BattleStar Galactica Unchained
by Calculonius
Summary: From the TV series, we know what Apollo and Starbuck were up to. But what was the human fleet up to, other than fleeing towards Earth and what they hoped it would be (with no backup plan)? Here I explore what could have happened - what the ragtag fleet could have done with the resources it had, in order to try to survive and find a more permanent solution than just fleeing forever
1. Chapter 1

BattleStar Galactica Unchained

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Here is my take on BattleStar Galactica, the 1978 TV series.

The original story creator, Glen Larson, apparently sees, as a backdrop or a setting, what I see as the main story - One BattleStar escorting the remnants of Humanity in whatever ships they could get, fleeing from a Cylon Empire that will not rest until it destroys them all. He is of course welcome to tell his story in whatever way he wants to, even if it's not the one I wanted to hear.

I wanted to hear what the human fleet would do to try to survive & improve on their situation - especially what an intelligent person could do with the meager resources they had. But Mr Larson wanted to tell us stories like who is in love with whom, who finds their long-lost father and how that works out, who got shot down and how they managed, who got framed for murder and how they managed, etc. He mentioned very little about how Humanity and its fleet managed. In fact, his episodes are a lot like an old sitcom or cartoon, in that the basic situation never changes, no matter what happened in the last episode.

Since he wouldn't tell me the story I was curious about, I had to think it through and tell it myself. I had to do this for my own satisfaction, but I hope others enjoy it too.

I re-watched all the episodes & read all 14 of Glen Larson's novels first. There is a lot of contradictory material between the books, but I did my best.

So again, in my mind, the story isn't about characters: who loves who, their grief and other emotions & so on. Rather it is, or should be, on "what do we do now to try to survive" - "how do we best use what we have to build our strength, overcome all obstacles as best we may, & seek a satisfactory ending".

So my version doesn't involve the main characters much.

And I wanted to know how it all ended, though the author's mindset became clear in reading the books: the original ragtag fleet of 220 ships had fallen down to 120 ships by book 6 page 23, with the proximate cause being listed as salvaging/scrapping damaged ships to keep the others going. That, plus continually running out of food and fuel, suggests that, in Glen Larson's mind, Humanity was gradually being whittled down to nothing. That's not an ending I liked.

But he missed some opportunities, or rather, did not develop certain things he introduced. These could change the course of things.

My story is in the spirit of " ", (in case that address gets stripped out, that's How It Should Have Ended (minus the spaces) point cee oh emm), where a number of popular stories get alternate endings. My favorite are the ones, like the Lord of the Rings one, where something the author either didn't notice, or glossed over, would have made the story go very differently.

Key:

Since many of the terms used in the TV shows have unclear meanings or even change meaning, here are the meanings I'm using. Where not specified, I keep it simple and use regular terms like second, day or week, since using too many special terms felt awkward.

Sometimes a term like Micron seeps through, though I try to define it in context.

Centon= Minute

Yahren=Year

Metron=Meter

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Actual Story:

Alfred Pike walked down the corridor of the BattleStar Galactica musing on the events that had brought him here.

He had never expected to be on a military ship - his right leg was a little shorter than the other, meaning he was never suitable for the military, as he could not meet the physical fitness requirements.

And while he'd been interested in all things military for a while, he'd eventually found other interests.

In a way, that is what had brought him here.

Though he still never would have been here if he hadn't lost his family on Carillon, when the Cylons attacked. The destruction of the 12 Colonies and most of the human race had left many of the survivors, including himself, in something like a state of shock. His wife and children had been the only solace he could find, so he'd withdrawn into family life, such as it was, in their cramped cubicle on an overcrowded ship. But when they'd died on Carillon, he'd been shocked out of the constant daze he'd been in. Now he had a new reason for living - he felt driven to do all he could to prevent any further losses.

He needed to spare others the grief he felt. At least he needed to do all he could towards that end.

So he'd done something he never would have done otherwise, and campaigned for political office. He had no real ability to change things otherwise.

And he'd won.

He hadn't really expected to, but he'd had to try.

He wasn't a politician, or very charismatic. In fact he could be brusque and blunt, though on the inside he was very kind-hearted.

But he had some unusual sources of support to vote for him.

Before the Cylon victory, he had owned and run a factory called Pike Works. Many of its former workers had been saved and were in the fleet now. They were very loyal to him, partly because he'd always treated them right, and partly because he was a big part of the reason they'd been saved.

Not assuming anything was safe in time of war, he'd had emergency shelters under the factory. And, using the peace conference as an excuse, but really because he didn't trust the Cylons generally and wanted his workers close just in case anything went bad, he'd hosted a big peace party at the factory for his workers, their families, and friends.

That had come in handy.

When the Cylons had attacked the Colonies during the peace conference, his people had used the shelters and been safe.

And it was no coincidence that those shelters had been well-stocked.

Then when the broadcast had come about assembling the ragtag fleet, his people had all escaped in his factory's freighters.

He had those freighters to reduce transport costs, and he'd arranged their schedules so they were all at the factory when the peace conference aka Cylon victory had come.

He hadn't been sure what was going to happen, but anyone with ears had known the Cylons had consistently, for a thousand yahrens, sworn to eradicate all humans. And anyone with a brain should have been able to figure out that that wasn't likely to change overnight.

So he'd been ready just in case, and that had helped him, his family and friends, plus his workers, their families and friends, all of whom he referred to as 'his people' now.

And his people had not just voted for him, they'd been very active in encouraging others to vote for him.

Then he got more fame, and fans, from his experience on Carillon.

While most others had been gorging themselves in the resort, he and some of his people had been touring the tylium mines and refineries. Mainly his reason for doing so had been the curiosity of one industrialist and his best workers for how another race did similar things.

When the Ovions and Cylons attacked the humans on Carillon, his group had been surprised, but not unprepared. Their Ovion tour-guides had pulled weapons on them, assumed his apparently unarmed group had capitulated, and escorted them in to the lower chambers where they were to be eaten. It was then that Pike and his people had pulled out their concealed weapons (he'd always believed in his own responsibility to defend himself, and he encouraged that in others), took out their Ovion 'captors', investigated the pods containing other captured humans and got out of there.

But it was the way they'd gotten out that had gotten him some fame and votes.

He didn't just run.

He and his people had run back to the factory they'd been shown, recovered some ore-moving vehicles & taken them back in. They'd loaded them full of captured humans, even the ones who might have been too far gone to be savable, then driven to the Ovion freighters. They'd driven the vehicles aboard: freed humans, ore and all, judged the risk, and loaded as much tylium as they could, then taken off in all 6 freighters the Ovions had had there.

Flying a freighter had been part of his cross-training program at the Factory.

So they'd arrived at Galactica and escaped with the rest of the humans, but they'd freed people and brought a lot of fuel with them while doing so.

And that had made it possible for him to get enough votes to be voted onto the Council of 12.

Though only just barely.

There had been no less than 3 run-off elections before he finally won.

Consequently he'd missed the first 2 meetings and would have the lowest seniority on the Council.

All the Council members, except Adama, had low seniority, since all were newly elected. But seniority is a relative thing, and though they had little, he had less.

They'd needed a new Council, since the old one had been so foolish as to get themselves all killed while chasing dreams of peace by disarming on Carillon. They should have known better, since that same approach had just recently gotten most of the human race killed.

The sliding doors of the Council chamber opened and cut off his train of thought.

He'd barely entered the room when he heard -

"The observation gallery is the next door along, only Council members and their assistants are allowed in this door" sneered a man at the table wearing a particularly ornate robe.

"Hold on a moment Councilman Nendina, maybe he is here to take out the trash – after all, it is full", simpered a man to Nendina's right.

"Well, he certainly is dressed as a garbage collector" sniffed the arrogant Nendina.

"Hold please" interrupted Council President Adama "I see that you haven't learned the faces of the new Council of 12. I have. Please welcome Councilman Pike."

A series of barely polite nods around the table accompanied some whispers that Alfred couldn't hear.

For the first and only time, he regretted his choice of what to take with him when he fled the 12 Colonies to join the ragtag fleet. Most folks had taken clothes, mementos, maybe some food - things like that.

He, perhaps inevitably given his personality, hadn't taken any of that. Instead he'd taken his personal computer and as many data crystals as he could, each stuffed with data and computer programs. He had figured that if they survived at all, then preserving their technology base was important. And 'technology base' mostly meant what you could build. So he'd brought absolutely as much manufacturing data, plans, schematics & similar as he could.

And consequently he'd been wearing the same set of clothes – the only set he had, every day since then. He washed them every morning, but they were getting a little ragged.

Though, even new, his ordinary work clothes were certainly nothing like the ornate robes the rest of the Council was wearing.

He filed that away as something that, while it may impact his effectiveness at Council, ultimately was not something he cared about.

It just wasn't in him to care about clothes or appearances.

While he was musing on that, the Council Meeting had begun.

They skipped introductions and orientation, since they'd done that in the sessions he'd missed, and they didn't seem to want to do it again for an outsider like him - someone unlike themselves, that is.

They did mention that such information would be in a data packet he would be given at the end of the meeting.

The Council started with minor business,

At least to him it sounded minor. They seemed to think otherwise.

He listened with half an ear.

It was stuff like the enforcement of an existing curfew, and the exact wording of a planned announcement to encourage people to search for and salvage any metals or electronics they could find.

Alfred had objections - the details were impractical and would have unintended consequences. He said so and then voted no.

The votes on those came up 10-2. He and Adama stood against everyone else.

It was as he'd feared – they didn't understand how to be practical. Other than Adama, there wasn't a real achiever among them. All of them were either career politicians, celebrities, famous newscasters or similar. That is, people who were completely unfamiliar with actually getting things done and running things in a practical manner. In short, most were famous because of the type of work they'd chosen, and they'd won election simply because they were famous.

After the minor business was done, each Councilor got a chance to present his own agenda.

Adama started, with some sensible recommendations for the military, then sat down.

But Alfred listened in growing dismay as one Councilor after another presented plans, most of which amounted to "the most important thing we can do is upgrade accommodations for our people, starting with the ones who voted for me".

Well, this is what he'd come for - to try to rationalize production, among other things.

They desperately needed to make the best use of it, since they didn't have much production capacity.

The Galactica had a comprehensive suite of repair facilities for itself and its fighters, and it could be, and had been, adapted to build whole new fighters.

And they had a couple ships designed for minerals extraction, electronics manufacture, or as foundries.

And last and least significant were the odd miscellaneous bits they were finding on the various ships of the fleet.

When the call came to flee and join the ragtag fleet, people had flocked haphazardly to any ship they could. Since Cylons were in the area searching for survivors, they'd mostly been disorganized and in a hurry. Consequently, some of what the ships had previously carried had stayed aboard. While it would have been optimal to discard anything non-essential to make maximal room for passengers and food, ships had tended to throw out unnecessary stuff as passengers arrived & then suddenly take off and leave when their captains judged the Cylon danger to be too high to stay any longer. Many ships had stayed until full, and overfull - way overfull, of passengers. But many had had to leave sooner than that.

So all sorts of odd tidbits were being found on them, now that they had time to look.

And some of those tidbits were machines they could use.

And while passenger accommodations were indeed abysmal, there were more urgent needs.

As the other Councilors finished, Alfred steeled himself for his turn, which would be last, according to his lack of seniority.

He wasn't generally a talkative person. But this was something he cared about.

When his turn finally came, he stood and gave it his best shot.

"Councilors, you are right in that the most important issue is to decide how best to use our limited production facilities. And while passenger accommodations are desperately bad in most of the fleet, they are not, in fact, the most urgent thing we need to fix. People are tough and they can wait a little longer."

He was interrupted by shouts around the room from at least 3 sources.

"What could be more urgent than relieving the sufferings of the only real resource we have left - our people."

"You suggest that our people are unimportant!"

"How dare you put your own whims above the desperate needs of our people."

"We can't ask our people to suffer any more - they've been through too much."

"Order!" yelled President Adama. "Let the Councilor speak without interruption. Then will come the time for discussion."

Alfred was a bit flustered by the interruptions - no other Councilor had been interrupted. But he stubbornly refused to let it get to him. Not right now at least.

After noting to himself that Councilors Nendina, Ari, and Momet, seemed to be his main opponents, he resumed.

"Councilors, our people are not machines. When machines reach the end of their resources, they cease functioning. But a person can continue on a little further even if he is hungry and tired, if it is important enough to do so. And this is very important. As you will see in the documents I sent you, I have done the calculations and if we divert all the production we can to expanding our manufacturing capacity, even for a little while, we can make a dramatic difference in the situation we're all in. We can improve our defenses, expand our capacity to produce food, do ship repairs and upgrades, and yes, expand and improve our living quarters...In general, we can do a better job at taking care of all our needs - not just one."

He sat down and the room exploded into cacophony, as everyone tried to speak at once.

Unfortunately, most of them were doing as the 3 had done before - using emotional arguments to cast him as a bad guy who wanted people to suffer so he could get control of production and try his 'rash, insensitive, and dangerously speculative' ideas. Or at least that is what they called his ideas.

He interjected "You are mis-representing what I said. Did you even listen? I am suggesting we expand production so that ALL needs can be taken care of. The cost, as you see in your copies of the documents I sent out, is that 6% of our people will wait an average of 8 days longer for their better accommodations, while fully 68% will get better accommodations sooner, as the increased production catches up to, and passes, the original schedule!"

But that just set them off more, and the room filled with accusations, which generally had the theme that he was blinded by a love of machines and was eager to let his 'wishful thinking' increase the suffering in the fleet - that the people of the fleet would be his unwilling experimental subjects for an experiment that was doomed to failure due to many factors they imagined or exaggerated, but most especially due, as they said, to his 'unbounded naivety'.

"Look" He said. "This isn't a power-grab. I'm not trying to take away your goodies or tell you what to do. I just want to increase production to keep us all safer and happier, and a brief change in priorities is how we can do that."

"Oh, now he's saying that we're selfishly interested in only our own perks, and he is the only one that cares about the people generally."

"You keep twisting what I say."

"And now he's accusing us of being malicious. This must stop."

"Clear the gallery, so Councilor Pike's false and misleading ideas don't infect the public consciousness and fill them with unrealistic expectations."

10 hands went up in favor of the motion - Councilor Nendina and the 3 others in his faction, plus Councilors Ari and Momet, each with 2 others in their factions.

There was silence while the observers left the room.

Then Alfred discovered that, as with many politicians and celebrities, while their public personas were often very personable, in private they were quite different.

As soon as the door closed on the last observer, Councilman Momet snarled

"Look you grubby little peasant, we're running things, not you, and you certainly don't get to waltz in here, take over and try to make us look bad. You need to learn to respect your betters. I think an object lesson is on order."

While others started nodding, but before they did anything else, he took his chance to respond.

He rose, red-faced and said.

"Leaving aside your evident elitism, I will say that your responses have no connection at all to the facts you already know, or should know, and it is clear that, to the extent that any of you have even glanced at the documents I provided, it was only for the purpose of twisting them out of context so you could misrepresent them. I can only conclude that you are either irretrievably stupid, or are so corrupt in seeking benefits for those who voted for you, in other words, trying to buy their votes, that you are completely unreachable by reason ..."

At this point he was cut off by the explosion of noise in the room. Evidently the other Councilors did not agree with his assessment and disapproved of his making it.

Eventually Adama was able to bring the room to order again, though it took several tries.

The Council then quickly voted on three things.

First, they voted, enforceable by prison time, that he wasn't allowed to speak in Council any further until he made a full apology to each member who had been offended by him.

Second, they voted, amid many excuses that such a distraction would be essential for the morale of the people, that production would go to building a gambling casino in the Rising Star. This was what Nendina's faction had pressed for earlier when they'd had their turns to speak. Evidently deals were being made behind the scenes, and now acted on.

And last, to officially censure Alfred for his 'rudeness', they voted that, although each Council member got to administer a ship, his choice of ships to administer would be limited to only the smallest of the ships which had lost its administrator on Carillon, and further, that he had only 3 centons to decide.

That time limit didn't bother him as much as they had assumed it would. As part of the analysis he'd done in preparing documents for this meeting, he'd already reviewed every ship in the fleet, with its drawbacks and possibilities.

Not being allowed to speak, he indicated his choice by pointing to the list, at the name Colonial Movers.

That ship had lost its administrator, as well as half its complement, on Carillon.

He didn't want to think about who had been lost on Carillon - it hurt to think about the loss of his family. But he was never one to shrink from something simply because it hurt.

They accepted his choice, then taunted him a last little bit under the excuse of giving him another chance to apologize.

When he failed to do so, they told him to leave and not come back until he'd changed his mind.

Adama handed him a packet on the way out, detailing the rights and responsibilities of a Councilman.

As he walked down the corridor back towards his shuttle, he pulled out his communicator and called Floyd, who had been his foreman at Pike Works Factory and was still his right-hand man and all-around good guy.

"Hey Floyd"

"Hey boss, how'd it go"

"Floyd, you know the factory is gone, so I'm not your boss anymore, right? Nevermind, We've talked about that a hundred times. Anyway, as for how the meeting went - I'm not in jail, though it came close to that. So I guess you could say the meeting was just short of the worst possible it could have been. Except for Adama, they have no real-world work experience among them. They can't really grasp what can and can't be done, so they thought my production plan was just a power-grab where I tried to take away all their perks and goodies for myself. They got upset with me. I got upset back and now I am banned from going back until I apologize, which I'm not going to do."

"Want me to get the guys and bust some heads boss?"

"No Floyd. And though I know you're just kidding, we've got to be more careful, and not say stuff like that even in jest. These guys are seriously messed up & jokes like that could get us jail time."

"Got it, boss."

"What I want you to do, Floyd, is pick about 20 of our old factory crew, with their families - only volunteers, of course. I'll send you the list of the skills I want them to have. Get them moved over to our new ship. It's the Colonial Movers."

"What happened boss? I thought sure we'd get back one of our ships we brought up from the factory. They're in prime shape, already full of our people and were our property until the fleet 'nationalized them for the greater good'".

"I know Floyd, but Hauler 1, 2, 3, and 4 are already administered by somebody else, and the Council restricted me to ships that had lost their administrators. Don't worry about it. The Colonial Movers ship has good engines and some other features I can work with. Get our people there as soon as you can - we have work to do."

"Ok boss. Why only 20?"

"That's all the ship currently has room for - it lost that many on Carillon. Rather, it lost half again more than that, but we need some room for our people to work in - we may not have machines, but we'll build stuff by hand if we have to."

They said goodbye and hung up just as Alfred got to the shuttle bay.

He spent some centons looking for his shuttle, then asked someone, who directed him to a flight controller.

The flight controller said that that shuttle had been reassigned by the Council & that the Council had left him a message.

The message said that, though all Council members normally get a shuttle assigned for their use, he had no place to dock his, since the Colonial Movers ship had no shuttle bay, and further, he had little need to travel since he wasn't welcome back at the Council chambers until he apologized.

They advised him to wait for the shuttle which was doing general bus service - slowly cycling between the ships of the fleet. That would take hours or days, but they didn't seem to care.

He called Floyd back.

"Hey Floyd, what's the status on the Ovion tylium freighters we brought up from Carillon? I know they emptied them of tylium right after we got back, but have they collected them yet?"

"The bureaucracy is still dragging their feet boss - they say they can't allow people to use them until they scan them for any remaining traces of tylium."

"Great. In this case, that works for us. Can you fly one over to Galactica to get me and take me to Colonial Movers?"

"Sure thing boss. I'll be right there."

"Thanks Floyd."

He sat down to wait, and started reading the Council data packet that Adama had handed him.

There were some interesting things in there. Apparently, if he neither showed up, nor sent in a voting proxy, for 3 sessions in a row, he was automatically kicked off the Council. It seemed that was probably the trap that the 10 politicians on the Council wanted to catch him in. No problem, he could assign his voting proxy to Adama. Then if he kept up with reading the Council minutes, and sent in the occasional motion for them to discuss, he'd be fine. They would not be able to kick him off.

But even more interesting was this: Apparently, as a perk for being elected to the Council, all members got a 'welcome package'. That mostly consisted of production from the foundry ship Hephaestus - one shift worth, or in other words what they produced during one regular work day.

Adama had hand-written a number to call.

Alfred called it.

"Hello? This is Ron, administrator of Hephaestus, what can I do for you?"

"Hi this is Councilman Pike. I'm not really sure how this is supposed to work, but I understand I can ask for one shift's worth of production for my own needs?"

"That's right, where would you like your palatial mansion sire?"

"What?"

"Sorry your honor. I didn't mean to offend. I just assume you want your living quarters expanded and improved like all the rest did. We have an array of very fine furnishings we've become good at making - would you like to see them? In any case, what ship will it be on and how would you like me to proceed?"

"..."

"Your honor, please don't be upset with me, I meant no offense. Allow me to say again that I'm sorr-"

"Hold on Ron. Don't abase yourself for me. I'm not offended, just stunned that they'd waste production time like that. You're just doing your job as legally required, even if the result is being wasted on a bunch of wanna-be oligarchs who wouldn't know a good plan from a bad one if they had a map, directions, and a dozen expert helpers to explain it to them."

"Mr Pike, I think we're going to be friends."

"Thanks Ron. I get the impression you're a regular guy who knows his way around a factory floor. I'm almost always friends with such folks."

They chatted for a moment, then Alfred got down to business, directing that his production time be spent on making certain machines he would need - machines that would let him do his own production, to some degree.

"I like how you think Alfred - we'll start making some of that during the second shift tonight and get all of your machines to you by the end of the day tomorrow. But I'm pretty sure they won't take up all the time you're allotted - is there something else you'd like too?"

"Thanks Ron, I'll look over my books and get back to you on that. There are so many things I'll need that it's tough to choose. Will you be open for trade later? I mean, if you are tasked with, say, building shuttles, and I can make certain sub-assemblies for those, would you be willing to take my sub-assemblies in exchange for the time it would have taken you to make them?"

"Sure thing Alfred. And may I say it's a pleasure doing business with you."

"The same Ron, talk to you soon."

They hung up and Alfred happily gave all his attention to his data reader, looking for exactly which machines he could get that would serve him best.

When Floyd showed up, he was surprised to see Alfred so happy.

When he asked about it, Alfred explained "it turns out that being elected to the Council is what I'd hoped for after all, though not in the way I'd expected."

As they flew to the Colonial Movers ship, he explained his plans to use the machines he would get from his "welcome package" to make more machines & so effectively start on his expanded production plan on his own. As a Councilman and administrator of a ship, he could more or less do what he wanted with his ship.

It would be a slower start than he'd hoped for, but he expected he could still get the end result he wanted.

They spent the rest of the day making plans and organizing, At first just between the two of them on the Ovion tanker & then on the Colonial Movers ship with the rest of their people, once they'd arrived.

There was an interesting dichotomy on the Colonial Movers ship, which he discovered was named LowBoy 64 - the 64th freight ship operated by the Colonial Movers company, though they might as well just call it LowBoy, since none of the other ships from the Colonial Movers had managed to join the ragtag fleet.

His people were excited and motivated to work, mainly because of being back together in a situation that gave them jobs to do and looked promising.

But the people who had already been on the ship were fairly representative of most of the rest of the fleet - lethargic and hopeless, since they'd been packed in like sardines, fed barely enough, given nothing to hope for, and nothing to do.

There simply hadn't been room enough for them to do much of anything. The ships of the fleet had had one primary overriding focus when they fled - to save as many people as possible. And they had. People were crammed into every nook and cranny - most of them living in cubicals smaller than those which would have housed a large pet back on the 12 Colonies.

So there was no space for anything more than huddling in your cubicle, bored and with no real hope, waiting to be handed your next skimpy meal.

He aimed to fix that.

He promised them things would improve soon, but they were in no shape to believe it. Not yet anyway.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Alfred got up early the next morning a little stiff from sleeping on the floor of a hallway. He wasn't very stiff though - he was used to it now.

Very few in the ragtag fleet had any amenities.

After freshening up, he hurried to the part of the ship - one of its 6 freight modules - they would be using for their new workspace.

He was greeted by a sight that warmed his heart.

"Morning boss, we couldn't wait."

"Hi everyone. It's good to see you, and also to see you still have a great work ethic."

The room was already full of his people - his former factory workers. Some of his new machines had arrived and his people were checking them over and setting them up.

He organized them into teams and got to work himself.

The first order of business was getting material for the machines to work on.

The people of the fleet had been directed to scavenge what the could within the ships. But that was of limited use, and he had a better idea.

Nobody had complained yet about them using the shuttle-sized Ovion tylium tanker as a shuttle yesterday, to ferry their people around.

So they had come up with a plan. They quickly detached the empty tylium tanks, leaving a skeletal sort of a ship - it had a small bridge or large cockpit, however you chose to see that, a framework, and some engines.

Then they overcrowded the bridge with a pilot and 5 spares & used that former-tanker to go get the other 5 Ovion freighters/tankers/shuttles whatever you wanted to call them.

They did the same to them, leaving all the empty tylium tanks for inspection whenever the bureaucrats got around to doing so.

Then all 6 took off looking for small asteroids.

Space is mostly empty, but at the speeds they traveled at, they passed large or small rocks all the time.

Partway out, the man named Omega, who was communications officer on Galactica and de-facto air traffic controller called them up to ask what was going on.

But being a Councilor came in handy and all Alfred Pike had to do was claim they were on his business. Then Omega had no problem getting their flight plan retroactively approved.

Collecting asteroids proved to be fairly simple - after finding and scanning suitable candidates, each shuttle would just match speeds with its target, and get in close. Then the passengers got out in spacesuits with laser cutters, carved appropriate shapes into the asteroid so their shuttles' docking clamps could clamp on, then docked with the rock and returned to their ship, flying slowly and carefully so the rock didn't break loose.

Once they got some materials to work with, their plans were to add generic clamps, claws, cradles, and scoops, so they could skip any spacesuit work and scoop up asteroids much faster.

When they got back to LowBoy, their people were ready and the machines went into action at once.

Mostly, their machines were admirably suited to general work, and included certain basic machines like smelters, various hand tools, plus laser cutters and fusers, continuous formers etc.

They could make just about any shape of just about any material, though they could not do it as quickly as specialized machines could. And most electronics were completely beyond their abilities, at this point.

So they could not make the whole range of things they'd like to make, and certainly could not make most high-end or specialized things.

But they'd chosen well, and could make a wide range of simple things, including certain simple machines. They could also make a few specialized machines that they foreseen great need for.

And they had a pretty good capacity, considering the size of their operation, for cutting up asteroids, separating out the elements they were made up of, and forming those elements into the shapes and parts they needed.

So they smelted out the iron, nickel and other metals found in the rocks they'd collected, and mostly used them in making new machines. But they also purified the silicon for use.

At this point they could not let anything go to waste.

Among the first things they did, was adding the clamps, claws, cradles, and scoops to the Ovion ships. Then they sent them back out for more asteroids and any comets they could find.

Comets provide different elements than asteroids do, and tend to be rich in the elements that work best for Fusion, such as Hydrogen, and even Nitrogen, Carbon, and Oxygen. You didn't get as much energy when fusing, say, Oxygen, but you did get some. So when maximum energy gained over time was the goal, you fused only Hydrogen. But when best use of limited materials was the goal, you could fuse anything up to but excluding Iron and still get some energy.

And when you did, you got useful byproducts. Fuse 2 Hydrogen atoms & you get a Helium atom, which isn't very useful. But fuse 3 Helium atoms and you get a Carbon atom, which is useful but common. Then fuse 2 Carbons and you get a Magnesium atom. Or fuse a Carbon with a Nitrogen and get an Aluminum atom. The possibilities were endless, especially if you were willing to lose energy in the fusion process in order to get higher-numbered elements.

The byproducts didn't come out in much quantity, but were useful when you needed small amounts of something.

So they started making Fusion Generators. They'd need them, since all this foundry work was using a lot of energy and they were only allotted so much tylium.

Fusion technology was old and had largely been replaced by tylium use, which generated vastly more energy. But there was nothing wrong with fusion. In fact the technology had been more or less perfected long ago. And in cases like this where tylium was scarce and likely to remain so, using fusion made sense.

Then they split their time between duplicating certain machines, and using the large amount of silicon they'd collected to expand their living and work space.

The Colonial Movers ship was modular. It was a bridge at one end, a long central column often called a spine, and engines at the other end. Since it was designed to haul cargo, those engines were robust, to meet any need.

Then it had 6 freight modules or shipping containers attached to the central spine - a front group of 3, and a rear group of 3. Those were distributed evenly around the circumference of the spine, for balance.

Since the cargo it used to carry could vary significantly in weight, the spine was over-engineered to support much more weight than it was currently carrying.

And with their continuous formers, it wasn't hard to extrude silicon plates the same length as the current shipping containers - as long as you kept the input hopper full, you could extrude shapes of any length.

They used the laser fusers to fuse these silicon plates edge to edge, side to side etc and so create large empty, rectangular-shaped boxes. In other words, duplicates of the shipping containers. Each was attached on top of an existing shipping container.

They built them in place & 3 at a time to preserve the balance of the ship, though that was probably unnecessary, as long as they didn't try to land on a planet.

They made sure they were airtight, firmly attached, and strong, then installed airlocks and moved in.

They already needed the additional space for the new machines they were building and the new materials coming in on the 6 shuttles.

So they did it again and added 3 more. So now the ship had the 6 original shipping containers attached to it, and each of those had a new ceramic shipping container attached to it.

Then it was time to address the tylium problem. They had only so much allotted to them, and they were running through it too quickly. The new machines were now powered by fusion generators, also called energizers, but the shuttles still used tylium, and they had to keep using them or run out of materials and go idle.

Thankfully, there was a solution, and they were prepared for it. Centuries ago, when Marron had invented an improved Interstellar Drive, tylium was abundant, so the new Marron drive was designed to use it, for maximum performance.

But in their current situation, tylium was hard to come by. They didn't have time to stop and set up systematic searches for it, much less for serious mining operations if they found it. So mostly they coasted along on the supplies they already had, while obtaining a trickle from exploring any planets they passed by and finding some in outposts there.

The main source of tylium had always been asteroid mining, so now with Alfred having restarted that on a small scale they were getting a trickle there too, as his shuttles brought in whole asteroids and used everything in them, including any tylium they contained.

But the pre-Marron interstellar drive had not been forgotten, even though it had not been used in a while. That's part of the miracle of digital storage - old stuff need not be lost. And the plans for them were something Alfred had made certain to bring along, having anticipated the need.

Sure, pre-Marron drives were more cumbersome and bulky, and were marginally slower, but they could get by on Fusion energy. And they had, or could get, vast amounts of Hydrogen easily.

So they refitted the 6 Ovion ships, one at a time, for pre-Marron drives and Fusion power. Rather, they refitted one, tested it until they were certain all was well, then refitted the rest. They depended on those shuttles and didn't want to make any mistakes.

But it did work, though the shuttles looked pretty odd now.

Then they traded the drives that the 6 shuttles had formerly used to Ron at Hephaestus. He needed to build shuttles from time to time, and could just use those engines instead of making new ones. That saved him several hours of production time. He traded that time to Councilman Pike's people.

They used that time to get more machinery, much of it able to make things more specialized than they had been working on before.

Now they had a pretty good operation going.

They had a good selection of machines and space in which to use them.

They had an ongoing source of materials coming in on their 6 shuttles.

They were no longer using tylium for anything but moving LowBoy along. It took a little more as LowBoy got heavier, but they were bringing in a little, so it evened out.

And they even had a good chance of keeping their shuttles in service, as it happened. The bureaucrats still insisted they needed to inspect the shuttles for tylium residue before they could be deemed safe for humans to use. As if any tylium, even trace or microscopic amounts, wouldn't have been sucked up and used, given how hard the fleet was trying to make it last.

But they were going in circles trying to figure out how to inspect them, since the engines were in one place, the tylium tanks in another, and the rest in yet another place.

Any rational person would realize that if tylium traces were anywhere, it'd be in the tanks. They could inspect those and be done. But bureaucracies are very rarely rational.

So the 6 shuttles were in a sort of bureaucratic limbo, and looked like they would stay there.

That was fine with Alfred, since he was getting good use out of them and they didn't look likely to be used if the inspection ever got done. In that event, they were scheduled to "be available for tylium shipments", as if that would ever happen. The amounts they were encountering were too small to need tankers, and if they ever encountered a large source, it would almost certainly be in a depot or refinery, and such would have its own tankers.

So things were going well generally, but as always there were still things to solve.

They needed more workers. That was proving to be a problem

And Alfred hadn't given up yet on getting the Council to see reason. He wrote a letter to them saying:

'Councilors, I wanted to try again to make my point clear:

We are in the position of the poor fisherman in the fable, who stands on the riverbank all day every day catching just enough fish to feed himself for that day. What we need to realize is that the story need not end there - there are other options than just endlessly living hand-to-mouth. The fisherman can choose to go hungry for a day, sell his catch to buy an actual fishing line rather than the string he has been improvising with. Then on following days, this improvement enables him to catch more fish. Soon, he can skip eating for part of another day and sell his catch to buy a lure, which can catch fish without making him spend time digging worms for bait. This also improves his output. After catching up on calorie intake, he then has a surplus every day. He can smoke some of his catch to preserve it, giving him a buffer and more options for selling it. Similarly he can gradually improve the rest of his tackle & even buy a boat and a net, enabling him to catch enough fish to make a reasonable living & no longer live hand-to-mouth.

We can do the same - sure, upgrading living conditions is important. But if the people tough it out for even a few days longer, we can use the building capacity from those couple days to build more production capacity & thereby increase our ability to do everything. Like the fisherman, if we keep improving production, we can take care of all our needs better.

With most options in life, there are, among the available choices, good choices, better choices, and best choices.

Easing difficult living conditions is a good choice. Preserving our lives is a better choice - rather it is the best choice.

Our biggest priorities are food, fuel, and safety which really means weapons. But before we can manage any of those, we need increased build capacity, since with it we can address those 3 needs and without it we can't. Comfort is a comparatively low priority.

Please reconsider."

He soon got back a harshly worded letter saying fish have nothing to do with their problems. It condescendingly said he could 'play with string' as much as he liked if his thinking was 'down on that level', but not to bother them further with his overly simplistic ideas, which were really just a thin cover for an attempt to make himself rich at the expense of human suffering.

Alfred was disturbed that the Council had thus proved itself to be utterly clueless, but resolved that he simply had to do it himself if they wouldn't help.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

"Lazy Bastards!"

"Now Floyd, cut them some slack. If we think too negatively of them, it will prevent ever getting along with our shipmates, and we need them. Some of our new machines are sitting idle and we can't have that. Just try to remember what they've been through. That makes it easier to forgive them for their behavior - just sitting idle and waiting to be fed."

"But Boss, our people - the folks from Pike Works, have been through exactly the same things, and they're still willing to work."

"Yes, thank God for that. I think the difference, Floyd, is that our people have what they call Esprit De Corps - they've worked together as a team under us before. So they know and trust us and each-other generally, and especially they trust us when we say the situation can and will improve if they work with us. The folks who were already on the Colonial Movers ship have no such trust or experience. They just know they lost everything back on the 12 Colonies and have been cramped, hungry, and bored ever since."

"But Boss, surely they can see that they have a little more space now than they did before, and we're talking about building even more. Shouldn't that prove we can fix things if they help us."

"I'm sure it helps Floyd, but apparently there's a long way to go. I just can't think how to motivate them. We can't pay them - we have no money and there is almost nothing to spend it on anyway. So it wouldn't likely motivate them even if we could give them pocketfuls of Cubits. And Council rules require they get the same food as everyone else in the fleet, and living space proportional to everyone else on the ship. So we can't bribe them with food or living space. It's a quandary."

"Well Boss, at least our Pike Works people will work. And there's more where they came from!"

"Good point Floyd. That will help in the short term at least. Let me make some calls."

It turned out that he couldn't move any more people to his ship, because LowBoy was listed as full. And it took Council approval to 'resettle' people.

And while he was keeping up with Council business by reading everything Adama sent him and sending in his voting proxy for Adama to use, plus some motions and even some specific votes, he didn't believe for a centon that the Council would grant him anything they didn't have to.

They were still upset at him.

Possibly that was because he still regularly sent them letters. In those letters he explained clearly, and with no regards for their feelings, what was wrong in the fleet & what needed to happen to fix it. It was largely the same issue as before - they were misusing production to buy votes.

For his first few letters, they'd responded, and twisted his words, as before, in their rebuttals.

But for a while now, they hadn't responded. He doubted they even read his letters anymore.

But while he couldn't resettle his people, he could have them work on a different ship than they lived on, as long as he could provide transportation.

And he could do that.

But he would need more shuttles to do it well.

And while the list of things he could build on his own was expanding, he still couldn't build shuttle cockpits - specifically the electronics needed for control and sensor systems.

So he called up Ron on Hephaestus.

"Hey Ron, can we trade for some shuttle parts? Better yet, for the machines to make those parts? I'd like to build some new shuttles."

"Sorry, my whole ship will be idle by the end of the day" said a dejected Ron.

"What!" Alfred exploded.

"We're been running on whatever materials could be scavenged, and that had to run dry sometime. Apparently it has all been scavenged now. We're out of raw materials and new inflow isn't even a trickle."

"Why didn't you call me. I'd be more than happy to supply you. You know my shuttles are steadily bringing in new materials." offered Alfred.

"So does the Council, and they don't like you. They specifically ordered me, as they put it "not to encourage your pointless antics". So I officially can't trade with you any more, even for raw materials that I need if I'm to keep operating at all."

Alfred thought a moment, then said.

"I find that very discouraging. So discouraging that even a modest amount of encouragement won't even it out. Make of that what you will."

Ron chuckled, then Alfred continued.

"I'll tell you what. I can say with 100% confidence that your scavenging efforts will be successful again almost immediately. I'm going to have my shuttles leave raw materials in a place where you can't help but 'find' them - in your shuttle bay. Have your 'scavengers' look there. I'll leave a steady supply, in fact. And I don't want to make you run afoul of the Council, so I require nothing at all in return. Although, if some of your output 'just happened' to fail inspection and be placed in a trash bin in that same shuttle bay, we'd be happy to dispose of your trash for you..."

His response was a much louder chuckle, then "Thanks. Thanks a lot. I can definitely work with that. We should be able to get both shifts going again - we've been down to one for the last 2 days & even that one was about to stop."

"Don't mention it. I'm happy to help in any case, and even if I wasn't - we're all in this together, win or lose. And I'd like to win, somehow. But wait, you said 2 shifts? That's only 2/3 of the day. Haven't you been able to run a 3rd shift? Lord knows we need every bit of production we can get."

"We'd like to, but we can't get enough workers. There are plenty of people in the fleet, but, other than a few self-motivated types, most see no reason to work when they can sit idle and get the same food, shelter etc either way."

"Yah" sighed Alfred, "We're having the same problem. I'll let you know if I think of any solution."

There was mutual silence for a moment, then Alfred continued.

"Anyway Ron, I hear that certain machines are hard to build and consequently may have a high failure rate. If any of the attached list show up in your dumpster, I'd be willing as always to haul away your trash. The list, as you can see, is mostly for making the essential parts for Shuttle cockpits and coincidentally, I'm going to need even more shuttles than I had thought - I have to keep up my own asteroid collection for materials, plus do a lot more to feed your much larger capacity, plus bus some of my workers around, plus ship you as many materials as I can refine from these asteroids. Oh well" he mock-sighed "I imagine it will all work out somehow - maybe I will find something in a trash bin that can help."

"Oh, I'm sure of that" replied Ron. "In fact, I seem to recall a recent production run that all had questionable capacitors. I haven't the materials to make new capacitors, so I fear that I will have to throw them out."

Both chuckled.

"By the way Ron, when you get producing again, should you happen to make any spare laser turrets for Galactica in case she loses any, I'd be happy to store them for you. I have several places around the outside of my ship where I could fit them in. I"d even plug them in, to make sure they work..."

They both laughed, then worked out a few details and hung up.

Alfred then called the ship Administrators of Hauler 1, 2, 3, and 4 - the 4 ships that had formerly belonged to his factory and still housed his factory workers, plus their friends and families. Arranging to pick them up and drop them off each workday went smoothly.

He let Floyd call the individual workers and get them to volunteer.

Then they got busy building new shuttles, and redirecting much of their incoming raw materials stream to Hephaestus.

As expected, Ron had a bunch of machines in his dumpster for them when they dropped off materials for Hephaestus to 'scavenge'.

The next couple days were spent consolidating new territory, so to speak. That is, they had plenty of shuttle building to do, plus re-arranging schedules etc to get Ron fully supplied, stay fully supplied themselves, and transport to and from work as many former Pike Works folks as possible, even including a few incidental volunteer workers.

Just about the time it was all starting to work smoothly again, the Council issued a new ruling. Apparently they had noticed his asteroid collection flights, and, in a fit of pique, banned them.

Or tried to.

The excuse they used, so they didn't look like bad guys, was that it was unsafe for any unarmed ship, including shuttles, to leave the safety of the fleet, even for a very short distance and regardless of how recently the area had been patrolled.

But they forgot that, as creative as humans can be in coming up with excuses and restrictions, humans can be equally creative in coming up with ways around those restrictions.

Alfred had a small stockpile of materials, and he used that to go to work arming his shuttles. The restriction was on unarmed ships, so he would simply arm his ships.

He already had four laser turrets from Ron, so instead of 'testing and storing' those on his ship, he installed them on his shuttles, while building more both for his shuttles and his ship. Ron came through again and 'just happened' to have a 'faulty' production run of the right machines to make more laser turrets.

So there was only a brief hiccup in the steady stream of asteroids coming in and being processed into materials he and Ron could use. Four Shuttles were armed and back at work within hours, and the rest joined them very soon.

So now he had 15 shuttles collecting asteroids - 6 for him and 9 for Ron, plus a dozen more busing workers around and taking materials to Hephaestus. All using pre-Marron drives and Fusion power, so fuel wouldn't be an issue, and armed so Council orders would not be an issue.

But of course, since life is never easy, this caused a couple of problems.

He needed a place to keep his shuttles.

With just a few shuttles, he could dock them to the LowBoy's airlocks - that was standard procedure for all shuttles, even fighters, in the fleet when they went to visit a ship. But now he had more shuttles than airlocks.

By juggling flight schedules to keep most of them flying at any one time, he could temporarily solve that. But there were times when all needed to dock, and constantly flying with no time for maintenance was bad for the shuttles and wore down the pilots.

His second problem was that asteroids are mostly Silicon. So even though they tried to select the ones with the highest content of useful minerals, they were still accumulating vast amounts of Silicon and running out of places to keep it.

But there was an ancient saying:  
"Happy is the man who has 2 problems, for often they can be used to solve each-other."

And Alfred Pike was not generally somebody who stumbled into things blindly. He thought things through in advance as much as he could.

So he was already working on a solution for both problems.

He had built more machines called continuous formers and had them hard at work. These took an input material, like silicon, melted it, formed it, and extruded it as one continuous piece. There was no limit on the length of the piece as long as input material was available in a steady supply.

So he was laying down continuous strips each as wide as a tall man - 2 metrons. Each strip was 200 metrons long, and a metron thick for extra strength.

He also had teams working with Laser Cutters, set on low so they would melt and re-fuse materials rather than cut them. These were working to fuse the strips edge to edge. These edges had been cast with beveled edges, so when fused together, 2 plates formed a shallow arc. And when enough of them were fused together, they all formed a long cylinder 200 metrons long and 50 metrons in diameter, which they were calling a pod.

In a similar manner, he formed a circular plate for the end, in 2 halves, but instead of just fusing it on, they spent some time giving it something like hinges, so the bottom half could be like a door - opening and closing at will. Then, giving it an inner door as well, and making sure they each sealed well, they had half the front end of this new pod able to serve as a massive airlock.

And, since having only one airlock would have been a problem, they put 6 more, smaller ones, around the circumference on the pod on a reinforced ring near the front, as if the pod were wearing a spiked collar, but with cylinders instead of spikes. The cylinders each contained one airlock.

Now these things were not light. Not by a long shot.

So they'd put some time into calculating loads and stresses, and acted accordingly.

That's why they were building 2 of them - one to be on either side of LowBoy as outriggers to balance each-other. And the spars that would connect them to each-other and to LowBoy herself were very carefully engineered.

They were inspired by the spars that connected Galactica to her 2 launching bays, though a lot less complicated than those, which were hollow and contained spaces full of all the things ships were normally full of.

But LowBoy's spars would be solid silicon, both for strength and because Alfred didn't yet have the facilities to get fancy.

So 3 spars came from each pod and joined in the middle, at Lowboy. Actually, each spar joined mainly to its opposite spar on the other pod, for strength. Then the resulting continuous beam from one pod to the other had a sort of loop formed in its middle, designed to exactly fit the central spine that was LowBoy's core, in between her bridge and engines. This loop was carefully placed to fit in-between shipping containers: one loop fit in front of the front shipping containers, one loop fit in-between the forward and aft sets of containers, and one was after the aft set of containers.

Alfred's designers and workers spent quite a bit of time mating those loops to LowBoy's central spine and bracing everything to take the weight, and any stresses that would be generated by maneuvering the ship.

The spars had to angle in towards LowBoy, and then angle out again, since the pods were much longer than Lowboy was - 200 metrons long versus LowBoy's 36 metrons.

So the result looked pretty funny - like two long glass tubes joined by spars, and with a little bitty ship in-between, largely encased in glass, like a fly in amber. It was an odd kind of a trimaran, but it worked.

Now if they'd left it at that, they'd have only been able to fly along at a fraction of their former best speed. And that would have been a bit slower than the rest of the fleet. So of course they didn't leave it at that.

They built pre-Marron star drives, one for each pod, with big enough Fusion generators to run them. These, of course, went in the back of the pods, where engines go.

Between the 3 engines - one in LowBoy & one in each pod, they had plenty of power. In fact they had put significantly bigger engines into the pods than were needed - big enough so that they could move around just fine on just one pod's engine, even if each pod were loaded full of stuff, and they were towing another ship or two.

With the engines in place, each pod was now airtight, so work on the interior could begin.

Contrary to what a novice may assume, the interior work took a lot longer than forming the hull of the pod itself.

A big glass tube didn't take much at all to extrude, either in time or effort. And the airlocks were almost as easy. The engines at the rear were complicated enough, but those were a small job compared to the interior of the pod.

But the rest of each pod - the interior - required an intricate maze of pipes, wiring, ventilation shafts, control conduits, insulation, power conduits, bulkheads, furnishings etc, if it were to serve as crew quarters in a ship as well as factory space.

It would have been more complex yet if they tried to make it to former standards, such as including elevators. But those standards had gone away with the destruction of the 12 Colonies. Now they were just interested in whether things worked. So the pods got stairs and ramps instead of elevators. There were many similar compromises, resulting in the pod having a 'rough and ready' feeling to its interior. But it worked.

For now, they only built up the interior on one pod - it got some crew quarters, but mostly a lot more factory space for machines and manufacturing.

The other pod got used as a shuttle bay and a big empty storage bin for raw materials. It wasn't a very efficient shuttle bay yet, and wouldn't be until they could build a forcefield to replace the big airlock, like the Galactica had on her landing bays. That forcefield made it easy - it held in air, and you could fly fighters and shuttles right through it.

But they didn't have the machines yet that could make forcefields, so for now they had to use an airlock, which they mostly just left open while shuttles were launching or landing. It saved time, and the materials they were storing would not be harmed by exposure to vacuum. They needed bigger pumps to evacuate the air, and tanks to store it while the pod was open to vacuum, but it sped up shuttle operations.

The other thing they needed for better shuttle operations was more pilots. Their were pretty busy and needed more downtime. And that would only get worse as they brought even more shuttles into service.

Luckily it turned out to be easy to find volunteers for pilot training, apparently because flying shuttles got folks out and about, traveling between ships and seeing something other than the bulkheads of their tiny cubicles. It also shared, just a tiny bit by association, in the glory that went to Viper fighter pilots.

They did most of their shuttle pilot training via simulators, which they obtained from Ron, as well as more machines so they could build their own simulators.

But they supplemented that by letting new pilots watch the recordings of training sessions held in the new "academy" - the ship that had been converted from a research ship into a training venue for new warriors, including shuttle and Viper pilots.

Those recordings were restricted, but Councilman Pike had access.

And, as they got ready, new pilots could ease into the role by flying as shuttle co-pilots, gradually taking over control from the regular pilot as they got up to speed.

Then, because the long-term plan was to save as much tylium as they could for important things like fighter operations, and they needed to prove that it could work, they deactivated the Marron drive that LowBoy came with, disassembled and removed it, and replaced it with a pre-Marron star drive.

Once the new drive was working, Alfred called Ron.

"Hey Ron, I have an idea and I hope you can help me."

"Sure thing Alfred, what's up?"

"Well, I have a working star drive that I'd like to give you - I don't know what else to do with it. See, we swapped out the drive on our ship for a pre-Marron drive that works on Fusion, so we have the old Marron drive left over. I figured at worst you could use it for parts, but maybe we can do better than that."

"Ok, I follow so far, what are you planning?"

"The Council won't listen to anything I suggest, and permission from them is probably necessary, though that isn't exactly specified anywhere, but I was thinking that if you suggested it to them, we could build a new ship around this star drive. Specifically we could build a new agriculture ship to grow more food - we all know how short on that we've been. The ship administrators of the existing agriculture ships won't listen to a pariah like me, so I haven't been able to offer them space in my pods to grow more food, and I certainly don't know a thing about growing food myself, but I figure maybe if we presented them with a ship, they'd use it. I'd help you in making parts for it, of course."

"Sounds like a great idea Alfred, but it will be pretty tough - my people are already working as hard as they're willing to, and our schedule is full..."

"I know Ron, and that's part of why I called. I may be being too sneaky here, but I figure that if you mention the ship building idea to the Council, along with those problems, plus the idea that maybe you could motivate the folks to work if you had some prize you could award which the workers could compete for, such as the right to administrate the ship when it's done, then maybe we could not only get this done, but also set ourselves up for good things in the future. I have a sample proposal I'll send you, which you could just read to the Council."

"I'm happy to make the proposal to the Council Alfred, but I don't think it will work - I don't know that any of my folks want to administer a ship."

"That's ok Ron, I'll help as much as needed out of my own factories here. I can build parts of the ship, and take over a good chunk of your regular workload while you finish the ship. I just need the ship proposal, and the proposal about its administrator, to come from you."

"Ok, I get it. Sure. No problem. I'm happy to help."

"Thanks Ron, I owe you one."

Apparently Ron wasted no time sending in the proposals.

Alfred got a packet of information before each Council meeting, containing its agenda items, so he could send in his proxy votes about them. The next Council meeting was a day after he and Ron had spoken, yet the proposals were in the packet.

He had two ways he could proxy vote. One was to specify what his vote was on any specific issue. The other was to take no specific position and just let Adama cast Alfred's vote for him, in whatever way Adama felt best.

He took the second option in this case, to avoid creating any opposition via his support.

The measure passed, including the language he had suggested, which was that the builder of a ship could name the first administrator of that ship. They may have meant it for just this ship, but the wording was general enough to apply to future ships as well.

Alfred had wanted that in place for when and if he could build ships. In that case, he wanted to avoid letting the career politicians in the Council appoint their cronies to Administrator positions for political reasons that had nothing to do with practicality, where the appointees would almost certainly be unqualified, and likely to to cause problems for political reasons.


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

While all that was happening, Alfred got a new problem, though a minor one.

When it was first noticed that Hephaestus was running low on materials, Ron had appealed to the Council for any solution they could find.

In response, they had issued a ruling which was both vague and specific, but in all the wrong ways.

The ruling was apparently intended to spur more salvaging and production activities, but said it all in confusing terms that, while they may be understandable to career politicians and bureaucrats, were very confusing to regular people.

About the only things it said that most people understood, were that "the fleet must give the highest priority to providing Galactica with all it needs to continue military operations", and a list of some of those needs.

At the top of the list was salvage, but after that came "parts for LandRam ground vehicles". It turned out that the list was not in any particular order - neither by urgency nor by quantity needed. But that was not apparent to the regular folks who read it and tried to follow it.

So folks urgently produced LandRam parts. They made quantities that were never needed - enough to build half a dozen complete new LandRams.

The ruling thus ended up misdirecting the miscellaneous small production facilities - the ships that fled the Colonies while still containing a couple machines each, here and there - such that they all made parts for LandRams and sent them to Hephaestus for final assembly for Galactica's use. But it turned out that Galactica only needed a couple parts & didn't have room for 6 new LandRams.

Neither did Hephaestus.

So Ron, aware of the new pods attached to LowBoy, called Councilman Pike to ask if he could store 6 new LandRams for him.

Of course the answer was yes. They routinely did favors for each-other & this enabled quite a bit of production increase, overall.

And storing half a dozen big ground vehicles didn't seem like much of a problem.

At first Alfred parked them in the shuttle bay, but they were in the way there, so they moved them.

Floyd had had a clever idea that they could glue thin metal strips along certain parts of the surface of the ship, and put electromagnets in the LandRams. Then they could just park the vehicles on the surface of the ship and the magnets would hold them there.

This turned out to be very convenient.

Not only were they no longer in the way, but they could also use them to drive from one part of the ship to another along the metal strips, making it easier to get parts and crews to where they needed to work.

But that didn't keep all the LandRams busy all the time.

In a short time, they discovered that some folks were using the idle LandRams as de-facto living quarters - sleeping in them when they were off-shift.

Officially, that was not OK, as all living quarters had to be approved by the Accommodations Committee of Core Command - a bureaucracy set up by the Council to handle the fair sharing of living spaces.

But the committee had not specified anything about where folks just happened to fall asleep - only about where they were officially quartered. So Alfred chose to see it as folks taking off-duty naps while outside their assigned living quarters.

He did the same, in a way, since he mostly slept on the floor in front of his computer.

So the only action he took on the issue was to make sure that anybody who had access to enter a LandRam was trained in operating a LandRam - all aspects of it. That way the Council would have a much harder time of it, if they wanted to claim that unauthorized people were in them.

A couple days later, that came in very handy.

Cylon attacks had been occurring with some frequency the whole time the ragtag fleet had been traveling.

Mostly the attacks were fairly predictable - probably because the Cylons themselves were very predictable. In fact, that's what they hated about humans, or so they said - that humans were independent and disorderly. The Cylons wanted everything to be orderly, and said they could not allow humans to exist, since humans inherently had way too much capacity and inclination to disorder things. Even the human urge to explore bothered them, whether that was exploring new worlds or new frontiers in technology.

That is why they had been trying to wipe out humans for a thousand yahrens.

It was amazing that anybody had ever believed they'd suddenly changed their minds and wanted peace.

But such things were possible when you became complacent. And the humans had been complacent indeed. How else could a war last that long? They had developed sufficient defense that the war never touched the 12 Colonies themselves, then sat back on their laurels, for the most part. Effectively, they'd won, since the Cylons could not hurt them where it counted, then expected the Cylons to accept a peace. But they had not accepted peace. The humans, not wanting to subjugate or wipe out the Cylons, had not known what else to do.

So the 'war' had continued for a thousand yahrens which mostly meant the humans had to send military escorts for anything away from the Colonies, and the Colonies themselves were sometimes probed, though never seriously threatened.

But while the humans had complacently accepted that situation, the Cylons had been arming and preparing. That finally culminated with Baltar's betrayal, and the destruction of both the Fleet and the 12 worlds.

Alfred supposed that the result was inevitable - that given an infinitely long series of "double or nothing" games, eventually the result would come up "nothing" no matter how much the odds were stacked in your favor. That's what had happened in the thousand yahren war - They had been complacent with their successful defenses, and unwilling to end it by attacking aggressively, while the Cylons had never ceased trying. So eventually the Cylons had won, and had been trying to chase down the remaining humans and finish it ever since.

Luckily, the Cylons had to spread out their forces to search for the Galactica and ragtag fleet, which meant that when they found them and attacked, it was usually just a squadron attacking. Sometimes they could bring to bear the entire fighter complement of a Base-Star, and those fights were rough. But it hadn't been worse than that - not yet at least.

This Cylon attack on the fleet, the one which came a couple days after the LandRams became de-facto sleeping quarters, was just a squadron. But it happened to hit the part of the fleet where LowBoy was.

Frequently the Cylons were able to do some damage to one or more ships of the fleet before they were destroyed or driven off. Repairing that took valuable production time, though they rarely lost lives, since passenger and crew quarters were not next to the surface of the ship.

Less often, they lost a Viper or two.

The Galactica had all it could do replacing those Viper losses - both building replacement fighters and training replacement pilots.

Anyway, the latest Cylon squadron swept in towards LowBoy and Alfred was surprised when the LandRams joined in the defense. Lowboy had half a dozen laser turrets, like the ones on Galactica, installed already, with more in the works, and these fired energetically at the Cylons.

But so did the guns mounted on top of the LandRams - first one, then the other 5 when they got the idea.

Apparently, the folks sleeping in some, and driving in others, were tired of being shot at & wanted to shoot back.

And they were effective. While the laser turrets shot down 3 Cylon Raider fighters, the LandRams got 2 more before Vipers from the Galactica destroyed the rest.

Unfortunately, the Cylons killed LowBoy too.

Or so it appeared to outside observers. Some folks thought the ship was destroyed.

In fact, they hit pod one and breached its hull, resulting in all the atmosphere in it rapidly escaping and blowing with it a terrific amount of material which had been stored there. So chunks of rock and ore went flying, as did some partially-processed materials such as sheets and bars of metal, coils of wire, and similar things.

Apparently it looked pretty dramatic.

And more so since they also hit a control run from LowBoy's bridge to pod one's engine, resulting in Pod one's engine running at maximum thrust until they could get crews over there to fix it.

LowBoy nearly rammed a couple ships, but had just enough control, by running the other engines at max, and briefly in reverse, to steer and avoid them.

It got fixed soon enough, but had been scary in the meantime.

So of course the next thing on the build schedule, for what they were now calling the New Pike Works, became fixes for these problems.

Or it would have been, if the Council had not asserted their standing order on salvage, which was that any ship too damaged to repair would be cannibalized for parts and materials to repair other damaged ships. They claimed, probably from animosity towards Councilman Pike, that clearly LowBoy had been destroyed, so they demanded its salvage be used to repair 3 other ships which had also been damaged in the attack: the Raindrop, a former tanker, the Sweet Baby Ray, and the Flying Brick, all of which were now hauling refugees like the other ships in the fleet.

The fleet had already lost 6 ships this way - they had been damaged, then used up as materials to repair other damaged ships. Survivors from the damaged ships just got crammed even more tightly into the remaining ships.

One of the ships lost to such cannibalization was the Magic Carpet - a ship with a high number of folks who had voted for Councilman Ari, and which had had its passenger quarters expanded and upgraded.

This was an excellent illustration of why Councilman Pike wanted to upgrade production, and then defense, before accommodations - with better defenses they would take less damage and lose fewer ships to Cylon attacks.

And they did attack often, so any extra defense would help.

Anyway, not having LowBoy cannibalized became Alfred's biggest priority. He put all his shuttles temporarily onto the job of collecting the bars and sheets of iron, coils of wire, and other raw materials that blew out of Pod 1 with it's atmosphere.

This was "salvage" that had come from Pod 1, which was part of LowBoy now, and so technically met the Council's requirement.

Then they used that material, plus their workers and machines, to hurry over to Raindrop, Sweet Baby Ray, and Flying Brick, and repair them.

They got it done quick, before the Council could recognize that LowBoy had not been disassembled in order to do the other repairs.

Then they just continued on as if the Council's directive had been met, which it substantially had, though with the benefit of still having LowBoy in service after all was said and done.

And Alfred made plans to similarly repair any further damaged ships, so that no more ships were cannibalized and lost. They couldn't afford to lose any more.

He wished he'd had the ability to repair ships earlier, so he could have prevented the loss of the 6.

Then they got back to enhancing their pods.

They put independent controls for each pod into that pod itself. It amounted to a bridge, though was no more extensive than you'd find in a shuttle.

And they put in better compartmentalization inside both pods, and thickened their exterior shells. Calculations showed that a 10% increase in thickness would let them resist a single hit from a Cylon, which was as good as, or better than, most ships in the fleet.

So that's what they did that for now, while they started researching how they could do better.

While Cylons often got only a single hit, that's not something you wanted to count on.

While some of their production went to that, more went to making laser turrets for other ships. Ron wanted half a dozen on Hephaestus, but his own build queue was full, so he asked Alfred.

And the Pike Works people living on Hauler 1, 2, 3, and 4 apparently wanted to feel safer, so they bugged their ship administrators until they agreed to accept a full set each. How many turrets a ship could mount varied, but in their cases, that amounted to 8 each.

The administrators were reluctant, and offered nothing in return, but Alfred was just happy to get his people better protected - both his own workers and the people of the fleet generally. So he installed the guns quick while he still had permission.

Lastly, a friend of Ron's, named Lecto, who was foreman of Celestra's electronics factory, called up wanting some kind of turrets but unable to get any installed. His ship administrator, Commander Kronus, might have agreed to it, but he basically couldn't be reached by anyone but his assistant, Charka. And Charka not only wasn't a nice guy, but also wasn't interested in modifications to his ship.

So Lecto wasn't sure what could be done, but was asking for help and open to suggestions.

They talked a while, and hit on a plan.

Charka liked things pretty - especially his ship. So they planned that Lecto would approach him with an offer for some machines that could roam the surface of the ship, polishing it as they went.

If that was accepted, Lecto would call back, and Alfred would construct 8 LandRams with magnetic wheels and added buffing discs. They would be able to roam the ship's outer hull and polish as promised, but they would also act as mobile turrets.

While waiting for the return call, Alfred asked Floyd

"How do you build a laser turret that will fit on a Land Ram and is longer ranged than what they come with? The current range is a little less than a fighter has."

"I know not my friend"

"Consult the book of armaments".

That book, among the many books of plans and technological how-to books he'd brought, focused on weapons of all sorts.

It wasn't long before they found a suitable plan for such a laser cannon.

They were happily integrating it into the LandRam design, when the return call came, authorizing "Polishing vehicles" for Celestra.

They wasted no time building them. Then they refitted their existing LandRams with the longer-ranged turrets.

For a while they were not sure what to do with the old, shorter ranged, guns that had come off the LandRams. It seemed a waste to use them for scrap when they were at war and the weapons functioned just fine.

Then they found plans for simple Tripods that could be fitted to them, making them suitable as heavy crew-served weapons in the event they had ground combat.

Well, the Tripods weren't all that simple, in fact. They were no bigger than simple tripods, but each leg was internally motorized, so the thing could walk alongside any troops & thus did not need to be carried. And where the legs came together, just under the laser itself, it had a small but thick platform, containing a small Fusion energizer and computer.

They could also be set or commanded to aim and fire themselves, though not as well as a human could.

They looked like very nice weapons indeed.

Not that they were expecting any ground combat, but you never knew, in a war.

And speaking of war - you never had enough guns until the war was over.

So they kept on building.

They built 6 more laser turrets for LowBoy, which was all it could hold, then more to have them available when and if they could convince other ship administrators to mount them.

And they built more LandRams, machines, shuttles, and even more machines, and everything else they could think of that would help the fleet survive until they found, or could make, some kind of safe harbor - a place to stop running. Officially, that was Earth, but Alfred thought that was optional, as long as they could defend themselves adequately from any Cylon attacks. These attacks were a continual problem, but the laser turrets were already making a difference in reducing the damage from them, by contributing to taking out the Cylons faster than previously, and by making the Cylons dodge more, since nothing spoils your aim like being shot at.

They kept building, until they thought of a new thing to build, which diverted a fair amount of their build capacity.

The people of the fleet were mostly bored and idle.

Alfred kept nagging the Council about production and workers, not that they paid him much, if any, attention.

But the Council was apparently aware of the problem despite ignoring Councilman Pike, so they kept passing Resolutions about workers, but it didn't amount to much. Not only were the Resolutions poorly worded and anemic, but they were dis-asociated from reality: folks couldn't really work until there was space for them to work in, and there wouldn't be more space until enough people were willing to work on things, including expanding the available space.

It was a quandary.

But Alfred's people thought they may have a solution.

When you can't pay folks with anything meaningful, since there's nothing much to spend money on, and you can't bribe them with better living spaces or more food, despite the current allocations of those being skimpy and problematic, what do you do?

You offer to alleviate their boredom.

Most folks in the fleet had little to do but stare at the walls all day. That got old really really quick. If there was something to occupy their time, something they could acquire, acquiring it would be highly motivational.

It would need to be something they could hold in their hands, since anything above that level was, effectively, State property and could be "Nationalized" - collected at will by the Council's representatives for the use of the Fleet.

And it would need to be something that included no cutting-edge tech, in fact, no electronics of any sort, since all such was automatically Nationalized.

It had taken some searching through Alfred's many books, and plenty of discussions among his people, but Alfred's people had found an answer in the combination of several things.

While all electronics were nationalized, there was an older technology, called, variously, either Optronics, Optical Electronics, Optical Computing, or something along those lines.

While electronics moved electrons around, Optronics moved photons around. Otherwise, they aimed for, and achieved, the same kinds of things.

The field of electronics had offered more breakthroughs, and consequently far greater efficiencies, so eventually Optronics was dropped. It could still do basically everything that electronics could, but tended to be slower, bulkier, and somewhat less capable.

During the time when they had both been in competition with each other, there had been plenty of ways developed to interface them with each other.

And Alfred's extensive book collection included lots of information on Optronics, plans to make them and use them, and even some generalized translation schemes, enabling a plan that used electronics to be converted to a plan that used optronics, or vice-versa.

So he could build anything using Optronics instead of electronics.

And Optronics offered another benefit over not being something that would get Nationalized.

Optronics used mostly silicon. It used it for its equivalent of wiring, as long glass fibers. And it used it for it's equivalent of "logic gates", "resistors", "capacitors" and other electronic components. In Optronics, these all took the form of various specially formed crystals of differing opacity, with tens of thousands of such crystals, each microscopic in size, aggregated into larger lumps that were the equivalent of electronic chips. And those could all be made of glass, which is Silicon.

They had tons of Silicon from all the asteroids they were collecting, whereas the special minerals needed by electronics were in short supply.

And what Alfred's people wanted to build with Optronics was small, hand-held, video games. These were really nothing more than a case, a display, an interface (usually some buttons or a joystick), some electronics or their optronic equivalent, and software.

It could take yahrens to develop such software, which is why Alfred had made sure to bring along, in his data crystals, every sample of any kind of software or computer code that he could find. Over 7000 yahrens of human history on the 12 worlds alone, there was quite a lot of software in the public domain. He'd brought all of that, plus some more which was still copyrighted, which he had managed to acquire by trade or purchase. He wasn't sure, but he suspected some of those trades were with hackers who obtained things illicitly, and while such things may be in violation of copyrights, they'd have been lost if he didn't have copies.

So Alfred had many many full working sets of video game software. Enough to release 'new' ones regularly for yahrens.

And even if video games were not your favorite type of thing, they'd still entertain you if you were bored enough.

So now he had a motivator, and a way to make it, but still needed a way for people to work and earn it, despite most of them not having enough space to work in.

Except there was a sort of a toy, designed to appeal to teenagers, which Alfred had played with extensively while growing up, and had the schematics to make.

It was called Mr Former, and was a unit a little smaller than a man's torso. You simply plugged it into a power source, fed in materials at one end and got finished parts out the other end. It could take in almost any kind of material, do things to it like melt, heat treat, temper, anneal, etc and then, if melted, and so a liquid, pour it into molds.

All you need is energy to run it and material to run it on & you end up with small parts - made of whatever material you used as input, or alloy coming from that, and made according to the plans you fed in to its built-in miniature computer.

What is a computer but a series of small parts, like the case and frame, brackets to hold sub-assemblies, fans and so forth, plus assorted electronics. And what is a fan but another collection of small parts - the blades, a central shaft, protective grid covering, motor housing, windings within the motor, and some electronics.

Pretty much everything went the same way - you have many miscellaneous parts, plus some electronics.

And Mr Former could make everything but the electronics, assuming you could get somebody to assemble the parts it made.

Similarly, there was an older toy called Mr Crystal, for growing custom crystals from the materials you input and according to plans you fed its mini-computer. It was from an older time when Optronics were still competing with Electronics, and was meant to be a "make your own Optronics" tool.

It even used Optronics for its built-in mini-computer.

Mr Former used electronics for that and would need to be adapted to use Optronics instead.

But they could do that.

Where did that leave them?

If Alfred provided some people with Mr Former, and some others with Mr Crystal, and fed them both a steady supply of materials, he could get a steady supply of parts back. And he could give those parts, with some hand tools and plans, to other people for assembly into useful things, or at least into sub-assemblies for incorporation into bigger, or more specialized, useful things.

That is, folks could manufacture things even in the small spaces they currently lived in.

So, potentially at least, with these, the formerly idle people could be a distributed factory - making parts, or assembling them.

Sure, everything they made would use Optronics, which were less efficient, but something is better than nothing. They could find nothing like Mr Crystal for making electronics, and even if they could, Electronics used many trace minerals which were hard to come by.

So Optronics was something they could actually make, and make them out of mostly Silicon, which was cheap and abundant. And making it would not impact their high-end output at all - but rather parallel it, so they'd get a lot of simple machines, turrets, vehicle parts and so on, in addition to what they could get otherwise.

So the plan Alfred's people came up with was this - they would make a few optronic video game units and demonstrate them to potential workers, then offer them to those workers as pay for doing work.

For each worker that agreed, they'd provide a 'home' work setup - either a Mr Former, a Mr Crystal, or, for those with more skills, a set of hand-tools and plans for assembling parts into working machines or sub-assemblies.

Then people would get paid by their output, earning their own video game units, and unlocking more games and features for their units, as they produced more parts or sub-assemblies. They could also get paid with video game units by working in the full factories. And existing workers would get the same deal as new workers, though more generous because they had been working already without effective pay.

What could they produce at 'home'?

They could grow the 'home production' system by making more video games, Mr Former, Mr Crystal, and hand tools, but they could also make things necessary for the fleet - fusion generators, replacement parts for fixing ships, sub-assemblies for laser turrets pre-Marron drives or shuttles, small metal parts for Vipers, & so on.

Every big thing is made of smaller things, and such things as could be made by this system already already took most up of the output from the full-on production facilities. With that load removed, the full production facilities could devote more time and output to things which only they could make.

If successful, this new 'home' production system should greatly help Alfred's goal of improving overall production so they could better address the serious needs the fleet had, like food, fuel, and defense.

So they put in extra planning time to make success as likely as they could.

They determined that the biggest need would be motivation - they had to make these video game units worthwhile, so people would want to work for them.

So they combed through the books looking for similar things that had been produced in the past, and trying to choose the best one.

In the end, they did not choose the best one, but rather merged the features of a few similar things into one new thing.

The new video game units, to save space and remain handheld, would have no screens or keyboards. Rather they would project their displays onto surfaces like walls, or a piece of plastic you could unroll and attach. Similarly they would project a keyboard, or other game controls, onto any surface. And they had an optical sensor to watch how you interacted with those controls and interpret the result.

And since they had to have an optical sensor for that, it was an easy step to generalize it to have full video camera abilities.

It had the ability to play sound, for a better gaming experience, and that too got generalized a bit, so it could also record sound, in synch with the videos it recorded so those videos would be full-featured rather than silent.

Then they added a socket so they could read common memory crystals and other Grade B memory (the kind that folks keep family pictures, journals etc on), and circuits so that it could display those, and even record to them.

Many folks had brought keepsakes with them when they fled. Often, that meant things like family photos, journals, favorite books or movies etc. The readers for those used electronics which the fleet could use otherwise, so the readers had been nationalized for use in things like shuttle cockpits and displays and miscellaneous ship system repairs. But folks still had their memory crystals, since Grade B was not up to military specifications and so not worth salvaging.

It would be motivational for folks just to be able to look at their pictures again, or read, or keep up with their journals, even if video games were not interesting to them.

The units also needed a way to get new games, since no one thing would stay entertaining forever.

It seems that no matter how much storage space you have, you could always use more. And computer memory is no different. Especially when you are using old, non-optimal technology, and it needs to stay small enough to be hand-held.

So, while they managed to fit in enough memory to store about half a dozen games or equivalent books or videos, they feared it would not be enough.

But to that, like with many other things, there was a technical solution.

Better yet, this solution was definitely of the "kill two birds with one stone" type.

Many of the better games allowed players to play with each other, with teams or individuals playing and communicating together on one playing field against other teams or individuals.

But for that to work, the game units had to have the ability to communicate.

Luckily, Sigma Wave communicators could easily be built in, and network an astounding number of these devices, even in-between ships of the fleet. So people would be able to communicate both in-game, and outside any game, via game discussion boards.

And given the ability to communicate like that for one purpose, they might as well use the ability for other purposes too.

They designed each unit to have a unique serial number, which could then be used to make calls direct from one unit to another like communicators could, so people could talk.

And they also designed it so it would communicate with a big central computer which housed all the games, and anything else folks wanted to store there.

It was going to be a very big computer.

But it would greatly simplify the problem of how to distribute new games. With this approach, when folks turned in enough work to unlock a new game or feature, the central computer could send that game or feature to their specific video game unit. And if the game unit filled up, it could store things on the central computer instead of locally, and not lose them. So even though a game unit could only hold half a dozen games, it would appear to hold as many as the user could possibly earn, since any more than 6 would just stay on the central computer and be transmitted at need, with minimal delay.

And similarly, folks could not just copy a game from one unit to another - it needed a code for each specific game unit or it would not work.

Alfred hated to do it that way - he'd rather make information free, but the whole point was to motivate folks to work, which they wouldn't do if they could get the games free.

For the same reasons, they set certain limits on features like play time, storage space, and transmission time, which could either be 'rented' or 'bought' - earned bit by bit as you go, or in large chunks, by turning in completed work.

After several design meetings, and testing and refining some prototypes, plus completing the central computer and massive amounts of memory for it, they were almost ready for release.

But Alfred didn't trust the Council. Or rather, he did trust them to go out of their way to foil any plan of his, just for spite.

So first he had to get a Council resolution approved allowing video games and ownership of 'obsolete technology', like Optronics, or hand-held things that contained no military-grade salvage. Sure, those already had de-facto approval, just by the fact that no such thing had been Nationalized yet. But just because they hadn't, didn't mean they wouldn't or couldn't.

So in a way it was lucky that Alfred had been haranguing the Council in his letters to them, enough that they had first stopped responding to them, then stopped reading them altogether. Alfred kept those letters separate from his official Motions and Votes on Council business, and that had made it easier for the Council to just ignore them.

He'd imagined he might get advantage from the situation.

So now he tried it.

He sent in another haranguing letter to the Council, restating, in slightly varied ways, all the points he'd stated so often, about them being dangerously short-sighted, even irresponsible, about allocation of production, spending most of it for improving housing, but in the middle of it, he added information on Optronics, and both the "home production' plan and the video game plan, stating in carefully selected phrasing, that a lack of response from the Council on those issues would constitute approval of his plans and a guarantee not to alter them for at least 1 yahren.

Then Alfred metaphorically held his breath while next Council meeting came and went. But it worked - the Council remained silent & now he had legal cover for the whole plan.

Then they started releasing video game units.

They did it simply - no advertising or hype. They didn't try to convince people to want them. Rather they paid their own workers with them, and had their family members circulate while using them.

The shuttle that acted as a bus, while cycling between all the ships of the fleet, was a great place to do so. The bus ride was long and boring, so pulling out a video game was a purely natural way to spend the time. And of course folks saw it and asked about it, including especially how they could get one.

Folks got enlisted across the fleet that way, and then everybody around them got the chance to see the units and want one for themselves.

And the units could sell and explain themselves - each video game unit came with a short video explaining the 'home production' system, instructions of what to do and how: how to join, run the machines or do the assembly, get materials and send in production - everything.

Growth was more than Alfred's production could keep up with, at first. But the waiting list only increased demand for the units.

And as home production started, production surged.

Then Alfred and his people had to scramble to keep up with distribution and pickup schedules, including making more shuttles to deliver materials, pick up parts and sub-assemblies and even collect a lot more asteroids from which to refine the materials they made everything from.

In no time, their shuttle fleet tripled.

Between all the new shuttles, plus many simulators and training facilities, Pod 1 was filling up. Its 5 major floors - one for every 10 metrons of height - were great for shuttle bays or storing materials, but not so great for the simulators and training facilities.

So they gave it 4 minor floors, spaced every 2.5 metrons, on each of the top 2 major floors. That gave them a lot more usable space for simulators etc, but less room for raw materials stored in advance of need.

The bottom 3 major floors were still for shuttle bay and storage. The shuttle bay looked like it would need to take up more and more space, until it reached a capacity of about 125 shuttles, when no room would be left for raw materials.

So they started building 2 new pods - they had plenty of silicon, since even asteroids rich in metals tended to still be at least part silicon & most were largely made of silicon.

These new Pods they made of a tough, heat resistant ceramic instead of glass - since that change only required adding a certain few elements to the Silicon mix.

They built one new pod temporarily docked to the side of each of the current pods.

It would take a while to complete them, and they could come up with a permanent solution by then.

In the meantime, they'd just have to be careful not to maneuver suddenly.

Some nice side-benefits of the new game units popped up unexpectedly. Some folks wanted to acquire game units faster than they could earn them, and offered to trade. Most didn't have anything Alfred wanted, but a useful idea came out of the situation.

A lot of people had brought things with them such as books, movies, family photos, and journals. Alfred realized that by copying those to his central computer storage, much of human culture that would otherwise be lost, could be preserved. And Humanity was on a brink where any such preservation was very important. Much had already been lost forever, and the rest could go at any time.

So he traded.

Folks could get some time using game units in exchange for letting him copy the contents of their Grade B memory, which was the only type they still had. For private things, like journals, they set access rules, preventing access to all but specified individuals until a certain date, when it would go public.

Folks could also record whatever they knew which would be useful to Humanity later - to preserve its cultures and knowledge. This included their own histories, as well as teaching classes on anything they knew. They were not teaching actual live classes, but making recordings as if they were teaching a class. These recordings, whether video or writing, were stored and made available to everybody. Some folks expanded on this ability and started their own simple news services. They were not paid for such things as day-to-day happenings in the fleet, but kept doing it anyway simply because it interested them to do so.

Some rich folks wanted to buy game units, but Alfred refused to sell. The purpose of the units was to encourage folks to work, and folks looking to spend piles of credits they'd inherited or won gambling were not his target audience. They could work for the units like anybody else, but Alfred did not accept their money.

But there were folks whose money he did accept. Warriors, medics, factory workers, ship crew and others had continued to work this whole time, accepting pay in cubits or pay vouchers, even though there was nothing to spend them on.

These people were all that had kept things going and deserved to be rewarded, not just for their work, but for their good faith in working for promises that would likely never be met.

Their money was gladly accepted. They got a very favorable rate too.

But Alfred didn't want to accumulate money - if it just sat in an account it would be a drain on the economy. And while the economy had been dead, it was restarting again. Folks didn't have to produce only for him. Many were spending some free time in making things useful to themselves or others.

Alfred most definitely did not want to be a drain on that. To avoid being a drain, he needed to keep the money circulating.

So he spent it as fast as he got it - mostly on labor, but also in prizes for good thinking, initiative, leadership, or invention - especially initiative. People that would get busy and do things on their own, without needing to be told to, were worth a lot.

For example a Mr Li-Goh had, on his own initiative, invented a way to add connectors to the small pieces that Mr Former could produce. With these connectors, an arbitrary number of smaller pieces could snap tightly together to form a large piece. The connection was tight enough to hold things together by itself, for some purposes. For other purposes, the snap connection held things together, in the right positions and orientations, for them to be welded permanently.

It was a very useful refinement, and Alfred not only rewarded him, but hired him onto his design team.

And he wasn't the only one hiring. With his help, Ron at Hephaestus had managed to hire enough workers to fill out a third shift, thereby keeping the machines in use round the clock.

They produced some more machines for Alfred, expanding the list of things he could make and the efficiency with which he could make them. But mostly they worked on producing more Viper fighters. Ron had directions from the Council for what to build - mostly improved housing and repair parts for ships damaged in raids, but they had been specific about what each shift built. Consequently he had no instructions at all for what the 3rd shift built.

It seems he'd neglected to mention the existence of the 3rd shift to the Council.

So, while it had been all Galactica's shops could do, to produce enough Vipers to keep up with Viper losses, now they could begin to catch up and have Vipers to fill the bays which had been empty since the final fleet battle and loss of the 12 worlds.

Only 67 Vipers had returned to Galactica then, and she could house and operate more than twice that.

At full strength, she operated 4 squadrons of 40 Vipers each. With only the 67, they had split them between red and blue squadrons and retired the other 2 squadrons until they could get more Vipers to fill them again. While that had seemed a vain hope for a while, now it looked a lot more likely.

º°`°º¤ø¤º°`°º¤ø¤º°`

Author's note.

I know the number of Vipers is disputed and uncertain. I've found official sources saying it's 75 and 128. Since the official sources contradict each-other (in far more ways than just this), I had to choose one. So I went with the novels.

Page 191 of the 2nd novel gives numbers of Vipers in one squadron returning from battle as: 9 killed, 17 damaged, 12 ready for more combat. That's 38. The other squadron is said to have "similar numbers".

And Page 122 of book 6 says that 2 BattleStars have 8 squadrons between them (ie, 4 each).

Four squadrons at 38 each would be 152. But the squadron that went into battle with 38 may not have been full. The BattleStar is described (on an official poster) as having 16 launch tubes per landing bay & people tend to go for even numbers when designing things. So I assumed that the squadron mentioned in book 2 was 2 Vipers short when it launched, putting its nominal strength at 40. 4 squadrons of 40 would evenly match the number of Vipers launchable from 16 launch tubes, at 10 launches each using all tubes. Otherwise we're at 152 and 9.5 launches & that seemed messy.

The books also mention them building new Vipers from salvaged metal and training new pilots (Page 8-10 of book 2).

Then in book 11, page 192-194, it mentions a full strike of Vipers going out to attack a Base Star as 120 (it says "side by side in 60 ranks"), and that that leaves one squadron back in reserve. The total then is 160 & that agrees with the above.


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5

In and around arranging all that, Alfred jumped on the opportunity to get implicit Council approval as he had with the 'home production' idea, and sent another letter to the Council.

In it, he used the same approach - a restatement of all the arguments the Council was tired of hearing, and, embedded in them, some legalese stating, in effect, that if he did not hear back otherwise by next Council meeting, that would constitute approval of his plan to train Viper pilots and ground troops, to be ready in case of need.

He'd always thought it was wasteful to train "Warriors" to be excellent at both piloting fighters, and as regular ground troops. Each had specific skill sets that didn't overlap much. Fighter pilots needed dexterity, a solid technical grounding to understand their equipment, and an excellent spatial sense to keep track of many targets and friendlies moving in complex patterns at once. Ground troops needed strength, agility, and endurance training.

Training one person to do both was like training a medical nurse to also be a plumber. Ok, they shared some things, but bot much.

Sure, it was nice to have folks with many skills. But it was a luxury they could no longer afford. Specialized pilots could fly just as well as generalized Warriors, but would take a lot less time to train.

And if what was left of the human race was to survive, and hopefully prosper, they had to not only train people to fight, but they had to do it efficiently.

Alfred took a moment to reflect, sadly, that if they'd had soldiers - just regular ground troops who were not also trained to fly fighters and therefore rare - if they'd had enough soldiers, then his family may have survived Carillon.

So he wanted very to cover that need, but it would take time to find the right people and get started.

As with the previous letter, he didn't hear back.

What he did hear was "Hi Unc!"

"Sally, It's great to see you! What brings you here?" Alfred responded as he turned to discover his niece and gave her a big hug.

"My brother Nate got accepted into a training program, so he can't be my guardian anymore - He'll be too busy. So rather than go into an orphanage, I snuck on over here to see what you're up to."

"How did you manage that?"

"It was easy now that you have shuttles flying directly here from almost every ship in the fleet! Can I stay?"

"Sure. You're almost grown up anyway, so I'm sure we can find a spot for a bright young teenager such as yourself. To start, how about you help me organize shuttle flight schedules, since that's something you already know a bit about?"

"Sure thing! That sounds like fun."

"I hope you still think so in a week."

As they discussed how she and Nate had been doing, what Nate was training for (a grower position on an Agriculture ship), and how to get her transferred from her old ship to this one, he brought out some bar stock and made a chair framework for her, then cut and contoured a piece of sheet metal for the seat and back. He liked to "keep his hand in" as they said. He used the opportunity to show her how, as he went, and even let her do some of the work. But as before, it didn't seem something she had real interest in. That was ok, they would find something she liked and get her trained in that.

In the meantime, he put her new chair next to his and cleared some space for her to start working. His workroom was also his office, and was supposed to be his living space. But he had no room for a bed, so he slept on the floor.

Something would have to change about that.

"Sally, we need a stateroom for you to live in, assuming we can get the Accommodations Committee and/or the Ship Administrator of your former ship to agree. But this ship is full. So you have two choices. You can either live in a LandRam parked on the surface of the ship, or move in to quarters in the new pod we built and are just finishing."

"What are they like?"

"I'm told the LandRam is more than twice as spacious as most whole families currently live in, but it hasn't got a bed, shower etc. So the folks who choose to camp out in those come to the main ship for that kind of thing. On the other hand, the cabins in our new pod have never been tested, and folks have been reluctant to move in to them since the other pod got hit in an attack and lost all its atmosphere. We repaired it and strengthened both of them, but the bad perception remains even though it should now be about as durable as most of the ships in the fleet."

"Are the cabins in the pod big enough for you to work in too?"

"Oh yes. We're kind of focused on work here, and designed them with that in mind."

"Pod! But you have to come stay with me. You've outgrown this space already."

Sally won that argument, but only because he really had outgrown this space and she, having lost her parents, needed someone around. Some cabins had separate bedrooms, and they chose one of those. He could not really spare the time to move his stuff, but she eagerly volunteered.

Arrangements with the Ship Administrator on the ship Sally had come from went fine - he was happy to let her go to her uncle. That was good, since the Accommodations Committee was often hard to work with. But with the agreement of both ship admins and the person moving, they didn't need the Committee's approval. They only had to inform them of the change so Sally's rations could go to the right ship.

Sally took to her new job well, and soon was accompanying shuttle flights to get a better feel for how they worked and see if she could find ways to streamline operations. She made some good observations there, but that was not all she observed. She was outgoing and friendly and picked up all the latest gossip, especially about Viper pilots, who she called the "popular kids", even though most were quite a bit older than that.

"Unc! all the pilots on the Galactica are sick!"

"All?"

"Yes, really, all. Every one of them but Apollo and Starbuck, and they only escaped it because they were late to the party - late enough that quarantine had started."

Alfred had already heard all about Apollo's bachelor party as it approached, but Sally couldn't help herself and rehearsed the latest details anyway, before coming back to the news of the illness.

"It's bad Unc, really bad. They all might die! They have them in cryo chambers while they try to figure out what to do."

"I don't know Sally. I know how to fix things, not people. But I'll make some calls and see if there's anything I can do."

There was nothing. The Council hung up on him.

Adama was busy, but did inform him that a mission had already been launched to go to a certain asteroid and isolate the source of the infection there, since it was too hard to isolate it inside humans.

Only later, after it returned, did he find out that the mission could really have used some help.

It had had to use trainee Viper pilots and an unarmed shuttle. While he didn't have any Viper pilots yet, he could have at least loaned them an armed shuttle, or several. His shuttle pilots had been practicing gunnery - blowing bigger asteroids into smaller chunks to make them easier to ship, and they were getting pretty good.

He sighed and resolved to continue his efforts, so that such missions as this - desperate affairs run on a shoe-string since that's all they had - could be avoided, or at least improved, in the future.

It looked like the most urgent fire to fight would be the lack of Viper Pilots. Training them took a lot of time, but he couldn't start in the past, so he started now.

Galactica had previously sent out a call for volunteers to learn to be Viper pilots.

They'd gotten many more applicants than they could use in the short term - enough to fill a hundred squadrons. But since they only had 4 squadrons and each of those had less than half their full allotment of Vipers, they had turned away most of the applicants. They thought they simply couldn't use them now & would train them later if they needed them.

Alfred thought that was short sighted, and current events seemed to bear him out.

He obtained, through his Council Member clearance, the list of rejected applicants and started making calls.

His basic pitch was this - they were needed, though there was no official recognition of that fact right now. But he could unofficially provide them the training they wanted, and so they'd be ready in case the officials changed their minds later and looked for more pilots. In that case, being already trained would just about guarantee their acceptance.

Most of them accepted.

So he built Viper simulators, and got each new trainee pilot a game unit, both as pay for their service, and on which to read manuals and watch recordings of the training sessions which were being held for the official Viper pilot candidates.

And since it would be a while before he had enough Viper simulators, he had his people look through his games. There were a vast number that had been made about war, many of them about flying Vipers, and some of those as realistic as could be managed. They chose a few realistic ones and sent them out to their pilot trainees as well. Sure, a game was not like a real Viper, not even if they'd intended the game to be as close as possible to the real thing. But it would start teaching some aspects of things - cockpit layout, the meanings of gauges and other controls, situational awareness etc, which they could then later improve on with real simulators & eventually actual training flights.

And he could get in some training flights indirectly, by having advanced trainees fly newly finished or repaired Vipers from the factory ship to Galactica. It wasn't much of a solo flight, but any little bit would help, and it would take a minor load off the real pilots - somebody had to ferry the Vipers that way.

But before any cadet would be allowed to fly a Viper, he had to master flying a shuttle. They had a lot of shuttles flying around, so there would be plenty of learning opportunities there.

He also asked his designers what they could come up with as far as a Training Viper - one that could be flown in training without using up precious tylium.

That was a big weakness, currently. Pilot trainees were getting only a single solo flight in an actual Viper, to conserve fuel.

That wasn't enough.

Any tool was only as good as its user could make it, and Vipers were no different.

He didn't expect that a pre-Marron drive could give the same performance that Vipers already had - not by a long shot.

But if they could make a Training Viper with a pre-Marron drive handle similarly, even if its top end was nowhere close to the same, then at least new pilots could get the hang of their craft before moving up to the real thing.

While his designers were working on that, he called up an old friend.

"Trosht, this is Alfred Pike, if I send a shuttle to pick you up, can you come see me for an hour? I have a proposal to make."

"Yes. Send it now."

He sent the shuttle.

Borellian No-Men were not known for lengthy conversations filled with pleasantries. They got right to the point.

Alfred had learned that when running Pike Works factory back on Scorpia and a group of them had started working in the mines nearby. The mines were in badlands harsh enough that few were willing to work there, so No-Men had been hired. They prided themselves on being tough and scoffed at difficulties. Their Code was all about developing Strength, and they followed it rigorously.

Over time, he'd gotten to know the whole crew, as they came to his factory occasionally for repairs to their equipment.

They were never warm and chatty, but they were human and did form attachments. He'd invited them to his peace party at the factory with the rest of his friends, so they'd successfully evacuated with the rest when the Colonies fell.

He understood that one ship had escaped the Cylon destruction of Borallus and joined the fleet. It had not been a major colony - not one of the 12 - but had been pretty substantial anyway. It's people had apparently fought to the last - the only ship they'd sent out was an ambulance ship filled with people too seriously wounded to keep fighting.

No matter how tough you are, when you're unconscious, you're done fighting for a while. It was a testament to the Borellian spirit that nobody but the unconscious, and one pilot who drew a short straw, made it out. They never give up.

There was a lot of negative feelings between the 12 Colonies and the No-Men, due to differences in their approach to life and how they saw things.

The Colonials and Borellians each looked down on each-other.

So after healing the Borellian wounded, their ship was largely avoided and ignored.

His door opened interrupting his reverie. Trosht, his friend, the Borellian No-man stood there.

"Speak."

"Welcome Trosht. It's good to see you my friend. If you or yours have needs, let me know and I will try to help. And I also need your help. I have permission to create a force of soldiers. I can think of nobody better than Borellian No-Men to train and lead them. I would present my case to your people, if you think there's a chance they will accept?"

There was a pause, then

"Come."

Together they turned and walked to the shuttle that had brought Trosht.

They conversed in a similar curt but friendly fashion while on the way to the Tenacity - the Borellian ship.

On arrival there, Alfred stayed in the shuttle while Trosht went in and arranged permission to come aboard, and a meeting with the Borellian Council.

Borellians had no use for bureaucracy, so there was almost no delay. Alfred was standing before their Council in no time.

Alfred screwed up his courage and started in on the speech he'd been thinking over.

"They called you No-Men as a term of derision, as if you were not men. You lived it down - turned it into a term of respect as if it means 'no Ordinary men'. And indeed that is what it now means. You are exceptional - you respect Strength, your Code demands it, and you do very well at achieving it. And the rest of humanity needs you, even though they are often weak. You need to let go of your contempt for them. We can no longer afford discord and resentment among ourselves. We must be strong and put those things away, so we can work together for the survival of us all.

A dead man can not be strong.

Neither can a dead race.

I understand the history of the resentment between you and the 12 Colonies.

You wanted to end the Cylon war. So did they. But each had a very different approach to it.

They thought they could just choose peace."

Alfred took a breath, and continued.

"The Colonies were wrong. They preach to each-other the importance of Peace, as if that will somehow influence the Cylons to accept peace, when they've always been against it. That is like a vegetarian convincing himself that his vegetarianism will prevent a lion from eating him if the lion gets a chance. The lion cares not at all what you believe nor how strongly you believe it. So it is with the Cylons. The Cylons, and the lion, each for their own reasons, will kill you if they can, regardless of how you feel about peace.

In a way, peace activists caused the war - not the start of it, but most of the thousand yahrens duration, by insisting on a negotiated peace as the only option, despite the Cylons' consistent rejection of that. Thus, the peace activists prevented the warriors from attacking and doing what it takes to end it. So they effectively prolonged the war by pretending that if we were nice and didn't attack, the Cylons would relent and accept peace. We can all see how well that worked out. The peace activists were so focused on the Cylons' right to exist that they forgot about our own. So now we have a difficult struggle to cling to existence while the Cylons actively try to do what they've always said they planned to do - wipe us out. If there was any doubt before, there should be none now - this is a war of extermination. And since the Cylons insist on a war of extermination, our choices come down to only 2: lose, or try to win. But we can't wish it away. We tried that for most of a thousand yahrens."

"It has always been much easier to destroy than to create, so unless effective defense, or something else like peace activism, is stopping attacks, then wars have an inherent time limit, just like a burning candle does. Each attack can destroy, in centons, what it took yahrens or decades to create. And so whatever mass of 'stuff' - buildings, ships, equipment, supplies etc, that a civilization has - however large a stockpile, it must dwindle to nothing if war, with effective attacks, continues very long.

The leaders of the 12 worlds chose not to attack - they sat behind their effective defenses until, by Baltar's treachery, those defenses were no longer effective enough. But treachery or no, eventually the Cylons would have found a way to hurt us."

"I know the Borellians wanted to attack & end the war, and that difference of opinion is a large part of what caused the rift between the 12 Colonies and Borallus. You and the 12 worlds each came to distrust, then dislike each-other. You saw them as weak and they saw you as brutal.

I know you value Strength, and that endless war weakens all involved.

I'd like to ask you to be Strong enough to ignore past slights and mistreatment. Whether we like it or not, we are all in the same boat now, or rather, in the same fleet. We will all succeed, or all fail. We need your help, despite hard feelings from most of the rest of the fleet. I ask you, is it Strength to allow others to determine your actions through looking down on you? Or is it Strength to consciously choose your own actions and reactions despite their dislike of you?

You are Strong in ways they are not. I know it is easy for you to despise the weak, but consider - are children strong? Not yet. Yet you do not despise them.

Be patient with the rest of us, as you are with children, while we work on developing strength.

I need you as infantry trainers and leaders, where you can pass on some of your strength.

Help us win.

Look down on us as comparatively weak if you must, but work with us to make us all strong enough to win."

"That is what I had to say. I know you like to keep things short, so I am sorry for the long speech. I felt that much had to be said. I await your decision."

The Council of Borellian No-Men sat in stony-faced silence for what seemed like a long time.

While that would be a bad sign with most, Alfred knew it was their way and waited patiently.

Eventually, from one end of the Council chamber, came a simple

"Yes."

Gradually, the other Borellian Council members also voted "Yes".

And that was that - the deal was agreed to in principle. And Borellians stuck to their principles like glue. They had no qualms about lying to an opponent, but by their rules there was no way that Alfred could be seen as an opponent.

Alfred sighed with relief.

They worked out the details of the plan in terse efficiency.

In discussing what was needed, it came out that Tenacity had been armed, though only with laser turrets - not with any heavy anti-ship weaponry.

Apparently all Borellian ships had been armed, even this hospital ship.

Tenacity was actually built in a Frigate, with some of the functions of a Frigate removed to make room for hospital ship functions.

But many of its laser turrets had been damaged as it fought Cylons before fleeing Borallus. And when they joined the fleet, all their remaining turrets were removed. "Salvage - to repair Galactica" was the excuse, but some of the undamaged turrets may have well stayed, so it was probably distrust of Borellians.

Alfred didn't waste any time before getting replacement turrets into the production queue for his factory.

He had one turret on hand at the moment & flew it over to install it. But as they were installing it, the Council heard about it, stopped the work, and forbid Alfred to give laser turrets to the Borellians or install existing ones on their ship. They didn't specify why - probably since they didn't have a defensible reason.

So, after a little thought, Alfred hired several Borellians to work in his factories. Coincidentally, almost all those Borellians were all working on making laser turrets for Pods 3 and 4 on LowBoy, which were getting close to completion. And the ones that were not working on making laser turrets were working on installing them.

Of course Alfred had to pay these new workers, and they chose to be paid in raw materials.

And Alfred never dictated to people what they could or couldn't do on their time off. He heard rumors that all his new Borellian workers liked to spend their free time in the machine shops making things. That was a little hard, since most machines were busy around the clock. But there were gaps, for instance, where a new machine was not yet integrated into the schedule & so not fully busy yet. And a lot of new machines just happened to get built then, as space for them became available in the new Pods. So the Borellians found machines to work on.

He carefully did not look into what they made. He did not want to know. What he did not know, he could not he held responsible for.

Officially, it was all a simple matter of hiring workers & was very very similar to any other group of workers in all particulars.

But somehow, Tenacity soon had all 15 of her laser turret mounts filled with working laser turrets again.

Alfred chuckled when he thought about it.

He chuckled after, of course, making sure that everything was documented and he had an airtight defense in case the Council got upset.

He was forbidden to give the Borellians laser turrets, but the Borellians themselves were not. In fact, the Council's authority largely stopped where ship administrators' authority started. That was in parallel to how things used to be - each of the 12 Colonies had a planetary government that handled affairs on that planet, while the Council oversaw it all and kept things cohesive. If a Planetary government wanted to do something local, like build a road, powerplant, or satellite, the Council had no direct authority over that. So it was with ships now. So all of this counted as the ship administrators - the new equivalent of a planetary government - making strictly local changes within their jurisdiction.

Damage from Cylon attacks had been dropping since they started installing laser turrets where they could, so Alfred was glad to see another ship armed, especially a fast and agile ship like Tenacity.


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Now that Alfred had leaders and trainers for his soldiers, he needed the soldiers themselves. And before he could advertise for them, he needed to be sure he had permission.

But Alfred could be devious and sneaky when it was required.

He still regularly participated in Council meetings, without actually speaking or going there, since he was still forbidden to do those. He participated by reading all the material that Adama sent him, sending in, through Adama, his votes on the various issues, and submitting his own proposals for votes.

So now he sent in another proposal for the Council to vote on.

It was a strongly worded and strict measure, to stringently limit the numbers and equipment of the guards that Council members could hire. Most of the Council members had personal guards already, and nobody had thought to place overt limits on them.

A day later the vote result came back.

It was Alfred had anticipated it would be - since he had no guards and they did, 10 Council members had seen this as nothing more than a personal attack by Councilman Pike on their privileges.

They had voted it down.

And that, as with everything, had consequences that had probably not been anticipated.

In this case, the consequence was that numbers and equipment of any Councilors Guard troops were explicitly not limited.

Or in other words, Alfred could now openly recruit and arm an army

So he just went ahead and added his recruitment offer to the official queue of announcements to be made to the fleet.

It was carefully worded so other Councilors could assume he just wanted a couple, maybe as many as half a dozen, guards.

Many more people than that accepted the job offer, and began their training as soon as arrangements could be made.

Pod 4 was being finished like Pod 2 had been - about half living space and half work space, with a big shuttle bay taking the remainder.

But Pod 3 was having to wait to be finished, so in the meantime it was like Pod 1: it had only the 5 major floors, one every 10 metrons. These stiffened the structure and couldn't be skipped long-term - not if you wanted to be safe. Later it would get 4 minor floors per major floor, and partitions making 2500 cabins, each 5 metrons square by 2.5 metrons high - or about the size of an average bedroom back on the Colonies. Most of the cabins had a connecting door to another cabin, lock-able from both sides, so families could treat 2-3 rooms as a suite, but individuals could just lock the door and forget about it.

Those 2500 cabins took just under half the total space, after accounting for hallways and necessary spaces like heating, air and water recycling etc. Areas configured for workspace took just as much space as the cabins. And the rest went to a shuttle bay that could hold 10 shuttles and 10 Vipers.

Pod 1 and 2 were tests, and were permanently attached to LowBoy. But it was Alfred's plan to be able to launch all other pods, numbered 3 and up, as their own separate ships, once they got engines and a bridge each. That was why each was just temporarily docked side by side with pod 1 or 2.

But for now, Pod 3 was just big 5 open spaces each as wide as the hull - 200 metrons by 50 metrons at its widest.

And while it was that way, the Borellians would use the open space to train his new guards army.

They had sent him training plans etc. Alfred read them, even though he had no military experience. He didn't want to shirk any duties he had towards what were, officially, his guards. But it sounded like the Borellians had a very good idea of how to proceed.

Alfred also got a list from the Borellians.

It was the list of requirements for his new soldiers, and he was surprised to discover just how much equipment soldiers required.

Colonial Warriors just carried a laser pistol most of the time.

It seems that long ago, near the start of the war, lasers were ruled the most humane weapon - the most controllable with the least chance of "collateral damage", and that other weapons fell out of favor after that.

You can do that kind of self-limitation when you are way out ahead of your opponents.

Now they were no longer way out ahead.

And the Borellians, in another example of the rift between them and the 12 Colonies, never accepted the plan to use only lasers.

To them, a soldier with only a laser was like a chef with only a frying pan - they could get by, but not nearly as well as they should.

So the Borellians had long familiarity with other ways of equipping soldiers, and they wanted to "do it right" and give the new soldiers all the gear they thought they needed.

It was quite a list of gear, including all the usual stuff like uniforms and boots, plus quite a bit more.

Alfred would have to build a number of new machines to make them.

Luckily the Borellians also had plans for how to make all these weapons & they transmitted those to Alfred as well.

So he started building the machines. It was going to take a lot of them - luckily there was room in Pod 4.

Not only did he need to make a laser pistol for each soldier, but a laser rifle as well, of Borellian design.

They could fire single shots, just like a pistol, but could also fire quick sequences of 3 shots or pulses, milliseconds apart. This was for taking down targets that were behind cover. Lasers liberate all their energy on contact, so even a thin and weak obstacle between a shooter and target would stop a laser pulse, as the obstacle liberated all the energy and got destroyed. The sequence of 3 shots was designed to defeat that - the first shot, or two if more obstacles existed, would blow apart the cover, and the 3rd would take down the intended target.

And while laser pistols could only fire shots as short pulses, the laser rifles could fire a continuous beam, though only at about half power, and only for a brief time before they ran out of energy. Continuous beams were good for 'mowing' groups of enemy troops, or for damaging enemy fighters.

It took a great deal of skill to hit a fighter with the individual laser pulses, but with a continuous beam, you just put in in front of the fighter and waited for the fighter to fly into it. It was much simpler.

And while a laser rifle pulse would take a chunk about half as big as a man out of a fighter, and a continuous beam would only do about half that much damage, either one would quite often impair their ability to fly and fight.

Fighters being very prevalent, it was important for troops to have some way to fight back against them.

Further, every laser rifle was to have an optional backpack-mounted Fusion energizer. This allowed for a continuous beam to be maintained much longer: a full Centon - 10 Microns instead of just the 1 Micron it could do it without a backpack energizer. And of course, having more energy let it cycle faster between shots.

Then on top of that, the troops were to have 'steam adapters' for their lasers. This was a small little clip-on chamber with a transparent, but tough, end, a small water reservoir, a port for adding more water from a canteen, and a place to hold a projectile. After attaching it to the front of the laser and adding water, one simply dialed down the laser power to a certain level, added a projectile, aimed, and fired.

The laser hit the water, flashing it to steam and rapidly expanding its volume by a factor of 1700, which vigorously propelled the projectile 'downrange'.

The laser pistol could use their steam adapter while being held normally, but the laser rifles, launching a greater weight and thus experiencing more recoil, would need to be braced against the ground or a wall before launching something with their steam projectors.

In theory, these steam adapters could launch just about any projectile, but the No-Men only sent designs for 4.

The projectile for the pistol adapter was to be a single dart, about the size of a man's little finger, and made mostly of Solenite. That wasn't much Solenite, but the explosive was strong enough, even in that small amount, to damage everything in an average-sized room to the point where any Cylons in it would be destroyed despite their armor.

It would take a lot of practice to develop much accuracy with the darts, since they went on a ballistic trajectory and glided at the end. But they could fly a considerable distance.

They'd have to restrict their practice with those to simulations, or to those times when they stopped at an uninhabited planet for resources. Practicing with explosives aboard a ship was a no-no, and they didn't have enough space aboard ship to try even inert dummy darts.

Mostly they stopped at asteroids for resources, since it was much faster than planets. They'd have to fit in a few more planets if they could, for practice. The darts flew so far that only a planet would really do for practicing with them.

Similarly, the first type of projectile for the rifle adapter was to be a cluster of 9 of those Solenite darts. By the nature of their flight, they would spread out a bit before impact and detonation, which would tend to affect every target in a small area.

The second type of projectile for the rifle adapter was to be a single, large Solenite dart, with a guidance package largely consisting of sensors, a tiny computer, and movable fins. This guided dart was about twice the size of a man's thumb, or almost 4 times the size of a standard Solenite dart, and proportionally more destructive. Better yet, it should be quite accurate at great range.

Since it wasn't always the best approach to build expensive guidance packages only to blow them up, it had an economy mode. When you absolutely had to be sure of pinpoint accuracy, you could leave the dart in normal mode and it would guide all the way to impact. But most of the time, you could put it in economy mode and the expensive guidance package would detach just short of the target - about 30 metrons short, to be clear of the blast. It would then set its guidance fins at opposite angles so it would spin like a maple seed, thus slowing its descent enough so it was not damaged on impact. Then it would broadcast a beacon so it could be located and reused.

In economy mode, that last 30 metrons of distance was unguided. But, given the guidance to that point, the dart would still hit very accurately, barring a sudden gust of wind or similar event.

The third type of projectile for the rifle adapter was to be a single chunk of Solenite, which they called a 'grenade', about three times as big as the guided dart.

While an unguided Solenite dart would mostly take out a room, a Solenite grenade would mostly take out a large building.

The grenades could also be thrown, if desired, though it would take a strong arm, or significant cover, to do so and survive the blast.

As destructive as the darts and grenades were, that wasn't the real reason for having them. Lasers could be very destructive too, and were far easier to hit with. But that was both a feature and a drawback. Lasers were direct fire - you had to be in a straight line with your target to use them. That meant that you, in turn, were exposed to your enemy's fire. And further it meant that if your enemy had strong cover - was behind a hill, in a trench; or something like that - you couldn't attack him.

The darts and grenades were indirect fire - you could attack while you or your enemy were in ravines, behind ridges or thick buildings etc. And unless they had indirect fire too, they could not shoot you while you were firing at them.

Hurting the enemy while not being hurt yourself is always a good plan.

And that wasn't the only use they had for Solenite darts.

The Borellians had requested small flying 'drones'. These were to be a lot like the remote-controlled toy Vipers and Cylon Raiders that children had played with back home on the 12 Colonies. Each was the length of a man's forearm and could fly silently while recording video and transmitting it back to the soldier with its remote-control unit. But each also had a silent launch system - a simple coiled spring, for the 2 Solenite darts it carried. The spring wouldn't get the darts far, but they could glide, potentially quite far, if launched from a height, such as the drones would be flying at.

With these, soldiers could not only get valuable information about any battlefield, but could also direct a couple dart attacks.

The Borellians recommended these drones be built to resemble Cylon Raiders, since they had better lift in an atmosphere & so could fly longer before needing to return and refuel. It also might confuse the Cylons if they saw them, though seeing them was unlikely given their small size and the height they planned to use them at.

And that was not the only toy the Borellians had weaponized.

Alfred never would have guessed that, of all things a soldier might need, balloons would be on the list.

Yes, inflatable balloons.

It was about lasers again - they had no penetrating power, per se. All their energy was liberated on contact with something. That generally vaporized the something, effectively making it explode, and that explosion could do a lot of damage. But a cloud of rapidly expanding gas that had recently been an obstacle wasn't always a threat - it damaged what it was in contact with, but, unless the object had been such that it would fragment and create shrapnel, it's damage potential fell off very rapidly with increasing distance.

And that was the idea behind defense balloons. They were made of a tough material that would vaporize well and not fragment, and were made to look like a man - man shaped, man sized & even printed with the picture of a warrior or soldier.

The procedure was, that rather than peek your head around a door or wall, or above some other cover, first you would inflate one of these defense balloons attached to your front or side, then peek. The way the balloon was attached, it would leave cover first, followed closely by the actual soldier. If any enemy was waiting to shoot the first thing they saw, they'd shoot the balloon, and their weapon would still be cycling when the soldier following the balloon shot them.

Sure, the balloons would never fool anyone with a moment to look at them. But in combat you reacted faster than that, or you got shot yourself.

Several uninflated balloons were stored in a small canister on the belt. They could be inflated by compressed gas from another canister.

And the really surprising thing was the free-floating ones.

These used the same two canisters - one holding balloons & another holding compressed gas to inflate them, but in this case the compressed gas was lighter than air.

And they added a third canister. That one also contained compressed gas, plus a guidance and remote-control package similar to, but much simpler than, the one on the guided Solenite darts.

When a balloon was inflated, the whole assembly flew like a toy blimp, propelled by releasing compressed gas and controlled by the soldier using the same controls he used for his drone.

With that, they could fly such a decoy balloon ahead of them in places where the enemy may be lurking, such as when searching a house room to room.

That way, surprise shots from hidden enemies would likely just take down a balloon instead of a soldier.

Each soldier's personal armor worked in a similar way.

The Cylons went all-out with full metal armor, but it rarely helped them.

So Alfred had been surprised to see personal body armor on the equipment list. But this stuff took a different approach than the Cylons took. While theirs aimed at being as tough as possible & would stop projectiles such as from Pneumos, the armor the Borellians proposed was what they call 'ablative', meaning it was designed to protect via being used up somehow.

The idea was really simple. Just as the balloons stopped an entire laser pulse, not by being tough, but simply because of the way lasers worked, this armor aimed at doing the same thing. All over the armor were inflated bubbles, calculated and designed to have enough material, and enough air behind them, so that when a laser pulse hit them, it would pop the bubble, vaporizing its material at just enough distance from the soldier's body to only bruise, but not otherwise damage, him. The air gap behind the bubble was crucial for attenuating the explosive damage caused when the laser vaporized the material. This air gap was about as deep as a human finger is long, so overall, the armor looked like an old style, low tech, set of winter clothing - the puffy kind.

To further help, the bubbles were backed by Polymesh and Nysteel - 2 advanced materials that were used in protective suits for the contact sport Triad. They were light, flexible, and yet very good at minimizing damage from concussive sources, like punches or small explosions.

So a soldier wearing this armor could still move freely, and yet take a hit from a laser pulse and only be bruised instead of dead, unless he was unlucky enough to be hit on a seam between 2 bubbles. But all war is risk, and having a good chance of taking a hit without serious damage was better than not having any such chance.

The armor came with patch kits, so soldiers could repair and re-inflate bubbles at need.

As an added benefit, a running soldier could leap and land flat on his stomach and be fine - the bubbles cushioned the landing. Sometimes soldiers had to do that, to get into cover quickly.

The armor came with helmets which made them adequate space suits when you added air tanks.

And the helmets included communicators, and multiple levels of light enhancement, and telescopic zoom in their visors. Lasers could fire much further than humans could accurately see, and the zoom helped with that a lot.

The Borellians also wanted a heavy laser, so each squad of troops would have a significant firepower boost when needed. But they didn't have plans for the laser they wanted.

Alfred asked if his tripod lasers would do.

Those were the ones that were originally mounted on LandRams before he upgraded the weapons on all his LandRams to have better range.

And the tripod, which could walk and also carried a Fusion Energizer and a small computer, would mean that no soldiers had to be dedicated to carrying the thing. Plus it could be set up to fire much faster - it just deployed the spades at the tips of its feet, stamped them a little to get them set, and started firing.

The Borellians liked this idea better than the one they'd suggested, so it got added to the production queue, in twice the numbers that the previous heavy weapon had been requested in.

That was because it could be remote-controlled, both for moving, and for firing. So no soldier needed to be exposed to enemy fire to use them.

You didn't want to lose equipment, but losing men was far worse.

Everyone knew of the Borellian energy bolas, so Alfred was surprised there was no order for more of those. The Borellians did send a schematic for making the machines to make the bolas, but they said there would be no need for any bolas anytime soon, since they planned to use them as incentives - telling soldiers they'd have to earn the privilege of carrying the bolas.

Alfred was surprised to learn that the Bolas were not actually the preferred weapon of the No-Men - it was simply the weapon the Council had let them keep when they joined the fleet. And they'd only let them keep it since they assumed it would be useless on board a ship - the Energy Bola was apparently a long-range weapon - you give it a moment to 'fix' the image of your preferred target, then throw to get it started, and then it would fly unerringly to that target at any range.

The Borellians found ways to use them at short range, but it wasn't optimal there.

And lastly they wanted a number of small highly mobile ground vehicles called Bantams. Each was sized so a shuttle could carry 4 Bantams instead of one LandRam. A Bantam could seat 4 soldiers, was open-topped, and could travel over just about any kind of terrain.

And of course, more soldiers than 4 could pile on at need, given it's open top and low sides.

Each one had a pintle-mounted heavy laser in the back, just like the tripod lasers. These had an optional steam adapter that was hopper-fed and thus fired much more rapidly than other steam adapters. They fired the same projectiles as the steam-adapted laser rifles did, though much faster and further.

Alfred was a bit taken aback by the amount of destruction even a small force of soldiers could inflict when outfitted with all this gear.

But the Borellians had sent along, at the end of the list, a quote which was popular among them:

"The more violence you use in war, the faster the war will be over, with less overall damage than if it lasted longer."

Alfred had actually heard that quote sarcastically and inaccurately summed up as "If violence isn't solving your problems, you're not using enough of it."

Still, he could see the point - the faster you overcame the enemy, the less damage overall tended to be caused. And to take him down fast, required vigorous use of as much violence as you could bring to bear.

So he got some of his factories to work making gear for soldiers. Actually, since he had a little time before the soldiers were ready he didn't dedicate existing production capacity to making gear for them. Rather, he used some production capacity to make more capacity, putting the new capacity in his new space in Pod 4, and dedicating that to making gear for soldiers.

His existing production schedules were already full of various important things, but now he added one more.

He wanted to launch Pods 3, 4, and up, as their own independent ships, but since Pod 1 got hit and damaged, he had been looking for ways to make them tougher.

The infantry armor had given him an idea.

And while he hated to undo work and re-do it differently, this time it would be worth it.

He would only have to relocate a few laser turrets, and 4 sensor clusters, on pods 3 and 4, to do his idea, which was this:

He would use the same process of continuous extrusion and welding which had made the cylindrical pods to begin with, to make tubular sheaths to put over them. The new tubes, which he thought of as being like turtle shells, would be like ablative armor for the pods, with a gap between the tube and the hull at all points except where it was attached.

So while the pods' own hull was integral to their structure, the tubes would not be. They would just be temporarily attached at front and back, and not used for anything at all but to shield the ship from hits.

The tubes would be designed to be easy to remove and replace if damaged, and damaged ones could easily be re-melted and re-extruded, since the tubes contained no wiring, conduit, power lines nor anything else - they were simple shields.

It was a little more complicated than a simple tube, since each pod had its 'spiked collar' - the reinforced ring containing 6 cylinders that extended out as airlocks. So the new tubes had to actually be in 2 pieces - one in front of the collar and one behind, but they would still be really simple to make or replace.

The hulls on Pods 3 and 4 were mostly solid anyway - other than the airlocks and engine, they had only been pierced for 4 sensor clusters and some laser turrets - the same ones that Alfred had to move.

It didn't take long with his designers to figure out where to move them - to the 'spiked collar', in-between the cylindrical airlocks which were already there. The circumference of the pods was over 150 metrons & the airlocks, even at 4 metrons wide with walls a metron thick, only took up 35 metrons of that space.

That left enough space for the turrets and sensors.

And while a ring of 6 laser turrets was nice, Alfred wanted more, so he made more LandRams to roam the surface of the pods as mobile turrets. He wanted at least a dozen each, though that would take time to build.

The designers even suggested a refinement - rather than have an air gap between the hull and the turtle-shell, they could store their spare water there. This would provide even more resistance to hits, since the laser wavelengths best suited to combat, and therefore used in all laser weapons, interact with water and flash it to steam. Certain wavelengths of lasers could pass through water without flashing it to steam, but they were not well-suited to combat & so were not used in weapons. And any water, hit and vaporized, would tend to be replaced by more water flowing in towards the hole.

The water layer would also give them deep reservoirs of stuff they could use as fuel for Fusion Energizers if comets should suddenly become rare somehow.

Thus far they had had no shortage of comets or asteroids, but space was varied and you never knew when you'd hit a particularly bare spot.


	7. Chapter 7

Chapter 7

Alfred occasionally wondered at the odd coincidences that happened sometimes - as if God had a sense of humor.

Here he had just prepared for the possibility of hitting a bare spot in space, and they'd just come in sight of one.

At least as far as they could tell, it was.

Sally had come running in, exclaiming "We almost lost Starbuck and Apollo!"

"Who?"

"UNC-le!" She gave him a disgusted look.

"Ok, ok. I do seem to recall they are among the 'popular kids' you often tell me about - Viper pilots I think."

sigh

"Sorry Sally. I like talking to you, but just can't seem to make myself care about the latest antics, romantic efforts, or gambling escapades of the 'popular kids' and their friends. I find it un-compelling in any case, but more so when we're in a struggle for our survival. If you can tell me how it matters in that context, I'll try harder to care and pay attention."

Without words, her look said 'you don't know what you're missing' the way a gourmet would look at a person who'd just said they were happy to eat only boiled potatoes.

But what she said was:

"This time it matters to our survival. They found something they are calling a Void - an absolutely enormous dust cloud that blocks the light from all other stars and has funny magnetic and electrical properties that make sensors and scanners go crazy. While Apollo and Starbuck were in it, they couldn't see anything but blackness and had to rely on Starbuck's dead-reckoning to get out!"

"That is interesting, but how does it relate to our survival? No matter how big it is, we can go around it."

"They say we can't - there are Cylon forces behind us and to our sides which would catch us if we turn. But what's more, they say that Commander Adama is sure this must be the Void that, according to legend, hides the planet Kobol, which, if we can get to it, should give us the location to Earth!"

"Ok, that is very significant indeed. Thanks. And while I'd love to talk with you some more, I need a few centons to think. Oh, and could you look over the shuttle schedules with an eye to the possibility of doing a Lot more asteroid and comet collecting runs for a short time? If we go in there, we may not find any for a while. We don't want to run out of supplies."

"Sure Unc."

And with that, they both sat at their computers for a while, quietly concentrating.

If Adama was convinced, then they were going in. That wasn't hard to guess. Adama was Commander of their BattleStar, president of the Council of 12, and a very forceful personality when he wanted to be.

If they were going in, then the fleet would be effectively blind for a while - until they stumbled on the far edge most likely.

But it was just possible that they would find Kobol in there. Adama knew far more about it than most - certainly more than Alfred.

And he had long ago learned that disagreeing with an expert, while you were ignorant on the subject, was a fool's ploy. Disagreeing when you were yourself were well informed was a very different matter, of course. But that didn't apply here.

So Alfred gave it a reasonable possibility that they would indeed fine Kobol in there.

And that had several implications.

First, he told Sally to go ahead and reschedule as many shuttle flights as they could, to collect as many asteroids and comets as they could.

It definitely would not do to run out of raw materials.

Second, he got his guys building hulls for Pods 5 and 6. The hull alone could be built very quickly and easily.

They'd need room to store all those asteroids and comets and the hulls of pods 5 and 6 could provide that.

He'd dock them temporarily to the sides of pods 1 and 2, just under pods 3 and 4, and accelerate work on completing all 4.

LowBoy would look pretty odd for a while.

Third, he realized that if they found Kobol, they would want as many teams on the surface as possible. While it had been 7000 yahrens since humans had abandoned the place due to its sun deteriorating and becoming variable, that didn't mean it was empty.

Not by a long shot.

Legend said 13 large fleets had carried off the 13 tribes, plus everything they could carry with them, but some things would have been left behind.

If nothing else there would be flora and fauna there, and the fleet was always on tight rations.

But it was likely that some large, unwieldy things were also left behind, thinking they'd be easier to replace than transport.

And while much decay can happen in 7000 yahrens, there were alloys commonly in use that did not seem subject to decay at all. He guessed they'd find out if that was true - if they really were indestructible, or not. It would be very nice to find some usable salvage there - the ragtag fleet had started with almost nothing - just refugees, the things they could carry, and the ships themselves. So just about anything would be useful.

And of course there would be many salvageable raw materials there. Looked at one way, that's the entirety of what a planet was made of. And while some are hard to recover, some would not be: piles of rust that were formerly machines would be easy to re-smelt and re-use.

And they would want to get video recordings of everything possible, for its cultural value, if nothing else. General knowledge was always worth expanding, and doing so often ended up benefiting you in unexpected ways.

And it seemed very possible that duplicate copies of records would have been judged extraneous and left behind. Some of those may have survived. Crystals didn't decay and that's what records were stored on now. If they had been in use 7000 yahrens ago, there may be treasure troves of information available.

All this pointed at the same idea - they had to prepare to loot Kobol, and do it on a massive scale.

So Alfred got some people organizing and equipping teams. Each team needed LandRams as cargo vehicles as well as shuttles to get them there and back, move them around from site to site, and probably make several cargo runs between the fleet and Kobol.

They also needed video recorders, hand scanners, and any tools that would help them get at, and recover, salvage, including, but not limited to, portable cranes and cutting tools.

And while landing shuttles on the planet would work, it would be much faster to land ships themselves and fill them up while they were there.

So Alfred got his designers looking at whether, and how, it's be safe to land on a planet in the pods, once they were completed as independent ships.

He was inclined to call them Liberty Ships.

And he hoped to be able to mass produce them quickly and in numbers, once they got everything figured out. Pods 1-6 were all steps in that direction - each contributing to knowledge and experience in how to make them. They would be standardized and simple, to make them easy to produce, though their "work" spaces could be filled as needed, as factory spaces, training facilities or whatever. They had ramps or stairs, even some ladders, instead of elevators, very simplified central heating which would inevitably leave some areas cold and others hot, small simple bridges for controlling the ship, and only enough sensors to see the nearby ships of the fleet and stay in formation with them. They were definitely in the "no frills" category. But they provided what was needed - space to live in and work in, and some measure of protection while doing so, via their thick hulls, turtle shells, and laser turrets.

Sally had developed well and was a wonder at her job - she had no trouble rescheduling their shuttles for asteroid collection. She even suggested, and got approved, a plan for several shuttles to convoy together. Thus far, shuttles had gone only where Viper patrols had recently gone. That way the Vipers had already scanned the area for Cylons, and coincidentally detected whatever else was out there, including comets and asteroids. And the Vipers were still nearby in case Cylons showed up.

But for the new intensive collection effort, they would not always be able to do that.

So Sally's idea was to send several shuttles in a pack for mutual defense. Each shuttle in Alfred's fleet mounted a laser turret like the ones on Galactica. In a group, that could be formidable. And Cylons performed very poorly when surprised, as they would be when shuttles, which had always been unarmed in the past, shot back effectively.

They anticipated that no shuttle capacity would be wasted in grouping together like that, since where you found one asteroid you usually found several, enough to fill many shuttles, or one larger one which could be shot into chunks, each small enough for a shuttle to bring back.

While they were arranging all that, Alfred heard back from Malkex, the Borellian No-Man who had been selected as the commander of Pike's Guard Army, as they were calling his new soldiers.

Malkex thought that it would be a great training opportunity to have his trainee soldiers all involved in the scouting and scavenging teams planned for the surface of Kobol.

Alfred agreed to that, and to altering the schedule for building their gear, to better prepare them for their duties on Kobol. For instance, heavy weapons could wait a bit, while transportation would be hurried a bit. And they'd need many more darts, both inert practice darts and real ones, for use while the opportunity to test them existed, in any desolate areas they found on the planet.

Alfred was curious why Malkex wanted the soldiers armor, complete with helmets and air bottles so they could serve as space suits, moved ahead in the schedule.

It turned out that part of it was in case they found areas on the planet with dangerous conditions, but also Malkex wanted to increase the area they could train in, by getting his soldiers out onto the surface of the ship and pods.

He was depending on the soldiers' Velotex-soled boots, plus their training, to be enough to make that safe.

And it may be.

Velotex, in addition to being a shock-absorbing material good for boot soles, was effectively adhesive in a way that didn't wear out. So, with boots or shoes soled with Velotex, an athlete could run up to a wall, jump so his boots contacted it, and cling for a brief moment.

It wasn't long enough to do anything much, but look impressive on the Triad court, but it should be adequate for sticking to a ship's surface when there was no gravity trying to pull you off.

But that gave Alfred an idea.

Ships had internal gravity. It made it so you could walk along corridors instead of jump from handhold to handhold like they used to very very long ago.

Maybe the ships internal gravity could be extended past the hull, instead of stopping at the hull as usual.

He checked with his designers and it turned out to be easy. It took more power, which is probably why nobody bothered with it normally. But there were lots of comets out there that Alfred could feed into his fusion energizers.

So he ordered it done.

The troops started practicing up on the surface of the ships, which now had normal gravity for about 3 metrons beyond the ship, set up so no matter where you were the ship would always be 'down'.

Soon, the soldiers were getting boxes and other shapes made out of spare silicon, and leaving them on the ships surface arranged as obstacle courses.

Realizing that the troops, in climbing obstacles, may just go further out than the gravity reached, they extended the gravity to 5 metrons. They also warned the troops to be careful of the gravity limits and came up with a new kind of projectile for their weapons' steam-adapters. It was mostly a coil of rope, with a variable 'fastener' head that could be Velotex, a magnet, or a hook.

Anytime soldiers were running the obstacle course, some were to be ready to use these new projectiles to fire a rope and fastener at any soldier who accidentally flew off into space. That'd be easier than launching a shuttle to go home in on their communicator, chase them down, and recover them.

While all that was going on, Alfred's designers came back with good news. With just a couple minor alterations, like more stiffening and better sensors underneath for pinpointing their altitude, the pods would be able to land on planets and take off again.

Alfred ordered it done, and incorporated into the design so future Liberty Ships would have the same ability.

Alfred was so busy he hardly noticed when the fleet entered the Void.

He was still tremendously busy when an excited blonde ran into his room and yelled

"Unc! did you hear the latest news?"

"Of course not Sally - you always hear news before I do. You know that."

Sally grinned.

"You'll like this one Unc - Councilmember Rohmcle is in big trouble for corruption, with rumors about her taking bribes, selling influence, charging for things like food and living space which are supposed to be free, and even enslaving some folks on her ship in a prostitution ring!"

"Wow. If true, I hope she fries."

"Unc you know they don't have the death penalty anywhere but on Scorpia. Anyway, it's true - her computer got hacked and her own private files talk about it. There's even video tape!"

"Wow again. I look forward to reading about the Council's investigation. I'd look forward to voting, but I'm probably still not welcome in person, even for that. I wonder if she'll have many visitors in the prison barge - she has a harsh tongue in private."

"Oh, she's not in jail."

"What?"

"The Council is describing the charges as 'baseless accusations, which are really just thinly disguised political attacks'."

"That's insane! Council members are not, or at least certainly should not be, above the law! Please tell me they are not going to subvert the law by skipping a trial?"

"Sorta - they have scheduled a trial, but it's as far in the future as is legally allowed - a week. And the rumors are that they aren't investigating very hard."

"Thanks for telling me Sally. I imagine some mention of it would be in the next packet of info I get about Council proceedings, but that's 3 days away and I'd bet it would downplay the situation. Excuse me now, please. I have several people to annoy."

With that Alfred got down to researching the situation, and sending off several motions to the Council to be voted on in their next session.

Mostly the motions amounted to various ways of saying "the guilty must be punished or society starts rotting, and those with more power and responsibility should be more accountable for their actions than others, not less."

One motion he suggested for voting, was that any Council member, ship administrator, or other leader, found guilty of such a crime should lose their leadership position and be forever banned from such positions. Criminals were not good choices for positions of power and responsibility.

Then Alfred read up on the relevant laws, in case he was allowed to participate in the trial.

Then he got back to work - he had lots of things to schedule, organize, and build.

Time flew, and the Council meeting came and went.

It turned out he was not welcome at the trial. Council members were tried by the Council, but they invoked unusual procedural rules to exclude Alfred.

It didn't look like that would matter anyway. The politicians on the Council saw everything in political terms. And it looked like, rather than actually consider guilt or innocence, they were going to consider the political situation, and maneuvering factions against other factions for political capitol.

It disgusted Alfred, but he'd done what he could.

And not only had the Council voted against the motions that Alfred had sent in, they had overreacted to the perceived political move, gone a step further and acted to preserve their powers by stipulating that ship administrators could only lose their position by a majority vote from the Council, as well as a criminal conviction.

Councilmember Rohmcle's trial came soon enough and was probably watched by everyone in the fleet. At least they watched what they had been allowed to watch - the incriminating videos were ruled inadmissible by the Council on a technicality, as were the hacked documents.

Witnesses who, before the trial, were vocal and unequivocal about her guilt seemed cowed and intimidated at the trial. They were also uncooperative with the prosecution and didn't say anything very useful towards gaining a conviction.

So there didn't end up being much of a trial - it ended up being Councilmember Rohmcle's word against the words of a few witnesses who refused to say much.

She was acquitted of all charges.

And the next morning, she was found murdered in her quarters.

The Council sure got worked up about that, and investigated strenuously, but found nothing. Whoever had committed the murder had finished by spraying the entire room in a thick layer of foam from a fire-extinguisher. The foam hid everything, covered any fingerprints, and any hair samples or similar things, if there even were any there to be found. They looked, but found nothing.

So they questioned everybody who might have had a grudge against her, and ended up including Councilman Pike in that list. High on that list, in fact, though he'd never had any dealings with her except through the Council meetings.

It looked like an attempt to blame it on him. But it got nowhere because he happened to have a perfect alibi - he was working in his ship's factory, setting up new machines, was doing so for hours both before and after the time of death, and there were hundreds of witnesses that he was there working.

Alfred was so busy working that he didn't even know he had been a suspect until they came, asked him a few questions and then left disappointed.

While he didn't want anybody getting away with murder, he was glad that, somehow, justice was served - he'd seen the evidence and had no doubts about her guilt.

He thought about it for probably half a centon, then got back to work.

He was vaguely aware that a replacement Councilmember was quickly elected, and that the factions within the Council had now changed totals, but he didn't worry about it much - apparently the new Councilor sided with one of the 3 factions that opposed him, so effectively, nothing had changed.

Then, unexpectedly, the Council acted on an issue Alfred had long since thought dead - the 6 Ovion-built tankers he'd brought up from Carillon. They ruled that these shuttles be scrapped immediately, since the fleet had no large amounts of tylium available to ship anywhere, nor were likely to. Tylium was only being found in very small amounts on asteroids and comets that Alfred's shuttles collected, and those small amounts certainly did not need tankers.

Alfred quickly came up with a plan.

They'd long since detached the tylium tanks from the shuttles, leaving them as just a bridge and engine sticking out at opposite ends of a very open framework with claws, clamps and such to better scoop up asteroids, which, coincidentally, worked very well - they were his best collectors & he made a note to build more in that style, especially since they could quickly scoop up other things too - a LandRam or big box of cargo, for instance.

Anyway, after making a call, he sent the shuttles to take their former tylium tanks for one last trip, to Hephaestus.

The empty tanks were melted down there, for scrap metal. They hadn't been in use anyway.

But, by arrangement with Ron, all that happened to the rest of each shuttle was removing 10 bolts, declaring it disassembled and the parts as 'scrap', then reattaching the bolts and declaring the shuttles 'newly built from scrap' and sending the shuttles back to their normal duties.

Since they'd previously changed out the engines for pre-Marron drives, the whole charade was fairly defensible - all that was left of the original shuttle was the framework and the bridge, and they had indeed been disassembled, if not very thoroughly.

It all gave Alfred a chuckle when he thought about it.

And then, suddenly, through the black Void, Kobol was sighted.

And while Andrew had been frantically getting ready for that, in case it happened, he still wasn't as ready as he'd have liked to be.

Pod 4 was basically ready to launch - it could do it's last little bit of finishing up while flying around as an independent ship named Liberty Ship 1.

And Pod 3 could launch and operate independently, though its interior was nowhere near done - it still only had its 5 major floors: no minor floors, cabin partitions etc.

Though in some ways that would work out well for the current mission: it could land on the planet, and then have big open spaces to fill with loot, or salvage - whatever you wanted to call it. The big open spaces would be very convenient for loading lots of cargo quickly and easily.

But Pods 5 and 6 had only their major floors and airlocks done. Their engines and bridges were incomplete and would not be completable by the time they got to the planet.

So Alfred got his folks working on the schedules, with the assumption that pods 5 and 6 would stay docked to LowBoy and just receive cargo from shuttles and Pod 3.

He also set in motion a plan he'd first thought of back when they entered the Void. He'd consulted some lawyers for the right wording, and Adama for permission, and, receiving both, had prepared a motion to submit to the Council. Actually Adama would submit it as if it were his motion, so it would have a better chance of being accepted.

The motion contained lots and lots of words.

It started with officious statements about making history and persevering through trying times, plus plenty of congratulations.

Then it continued on to several proposed celebrations that were low-impact & so very likely to be approved.

Then it had its apparent payload - in congratulations to the Council, each member was to receive 2 hours worth of production time from Hephaestus.

Alfred knew the Council would positively drool over that, and likely pass the motion for its sake alone - all of them but he and Adama lived like kings and seemed never to be satisfied with whatever finery they already had.

After that, the motion had a bunch of boring legalese ostensibly dealing with minor, even inconsequential, details regarding the celebrations.

Alfred knew this Council got bored easily, and didn't like to read lengthy documents in any case, so he figured they would stop reading around this point.

And buried in that legalese was the real payload - a clause ruling that all ships are to house and base Vipers at their shuttle bays or airlocks, when and if enough Vipers become available, and also allow upgrade of those airlocks/shuttle bays to facilitate this, and also allow engine changes to conserve fuel.

Alfred wanted this clause so that when they got enough Vipers built and pilots trained, more could be launched than from just Galactica. Many ships had shuttle bays with some room. And all ships had several airlocks with docking clamps, to which shuttles and Vipers regularly attached when they visited those ships. With no changes at all, these ships could already operate Vipers, if they chose, though not as well as Galactica could. Vipers launched from airlocks would not get the initial speed boost that Vipers got from Galactica's launch tubes, so it would take them longer to get up to combat speeds. And they would be a lot harder to maintain while hanging outside a ship like that.

That's why the clause included the bit about upgrades. Alfred could not put in external launch tubes, but he could improve the docking clamps, make refueling connections more available, and expand the docking tube to cover the front half of the Viper, back to the engines, so that part of the fighter could be maintained without a spacesuit, and so that pilots could get in faster.

And even if less effective, it was better to have the fighters than not.

Alfred liked to imagine his goal - not only having the Galactica full of fighters, but having 2 to 6 based at each and every ship in the fleet.

Laser turrets and such were nice, but when it came down to it, combat was always decided by Vipers - the more you had, the better you did.

It was a nice goal, and though still far away, Alfred worked towards it as much as he could.

And to have fuel to run that many Vipers, they needed to get the ships of the fleet off of Marron drives and on to pre-Marron drives. They had no trouble finding comets full of light elements, like Hydrogen, and even Carbon, Oxygen, and Nitrogen, to feed into Fusion generators. And fusion generators and pre-Marron drives would work fine for all the non-combat ships.

But they were just not finding much tylium. And high performance craft like Vipers needed the best drives, which ran on tylium.

So Alfred planned, when he'd built up enough production capacity, to replace the engines on the non-combat ships of the fleet with pre-Marron drives, freeing up what tylium they found for the Vipers and Galactica.

And this motion would allow him to do so.

He had expected to wait anxiously to see if the motion passed or not, but he was so busy he forgot about it until the latest packet of Council business came back to him.

It had passed. He had the permission he needed. So as soon as he got more production capacity - a lot more, he could start some real changes.

He spent his 2 hours of production time from Hephaestus getting more machines - ones that filled gaps and allowed him to produce things he couldn't before.

While Alfred thought any politician who passed a law, which he hadn't read, should be shot, he was happy with the result in this case.

Not long after sighting Kobol, they were there - too quickly from Albert's point of view.

He had so much to do that part of him resented the ship launching ceremony that his people insisted on for when they launched Pod 4 as Liberty Ship 1, and Pod 3 as Liberty Ship 2.

In regards to the upcoming ceremony, Sally had given him an ultimatum:

"You are NOT, wearing that ratty old shirt!"

"It's clean, and it's the only shirt I have."

Although it was beginning to remind Albert about that old joke, where some men keep wearing their clothes until they wore down to "3 loosely connected molecules".

His shirt was threadbare and starting to develop holes.

"So buy one - some folks brought extras."

"... good idea. I hadn't thought of that. I'd been wondering how to make them, and putting it off as a low priority."

So, with Alfred's agreement, Sally had instructed her shuttle pilots to ask around, while they were flying their routes, about any shirt for sale in Alfred's size.

One pilot had shown initiative, and not only found a shirt, but bought it and brought it back.

It seems an enterprising old woman had taken to making clothes for people out of the many sets of draperies hanging on the windows in the former passenger liner she currently called home.

The pattern on it positively shouted "window drapes", and you could tell it was handmade, but looked fine to Alfred. He didn't care much about clothes in any case.

So he wore it to the ship launching ceremony without a thought.

And whether they knew the situation and approved of the improvement, or just because they were his people and fiercely loyal, none of the people at the ceremony said a negative word.

In fact several of them were soon wearing 'new' garments that matched Alfred's.

As usual for anyone that showed initiative, Alfred rewarded both the shuttle pilot and the maker of the shirt.

And new ship administrators for Liberty 1 and 2, which Alfred got to appoint because he'd built the ships, were chosen from among those who'd received initiative rewards from Alfred. That's how he felt leaders should be chosen - they should be those who had solid common sense, a good work ethic, and did useful things on their own without having to have someone lead them from task to task.


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter 8

Very soon after the ship launching ceremony, the ragtag fleet reached Kobol, and Alfred's shuttles swarmed down to it to deliver vehicles and squads of people. The shuttles actually made several round trips, and only on the first trip back to the ships were they empty. After that first trip, the exploration and salvage squads had already collected things for the shuttles to carry back.

It was all Alfred had hoped for, and more.

Despite the decay you would expect after 7000 yahrens, there was plenty of salvage and raw materials.

Some things had been preserved from the elements by being deep inside thick stone buildings in dry areas.

Many more had been built of alloys that had proven, in fact, to be as impervious to corrosion and decay as had originally been advertised (at least it seemed likely they'd been advertised that way).

Some things were heavily corroded, but could be salvaged as raw materials.

And there were many places where piles of rust, left over from things that had completely corroeded, had accumulated and could be salvaged by shuttles or vehicles, using electromagnets.

There was a little difficulty when the 2 Liberty Ships landed - they had forgotten about their artificial gravity extending past the ships surface, or they'd have changed it back before landing.

But they had not set it back to ending at the ship's surface as was 'normal' for other ships.

So when they got within 5 metrons of the ground, they suddenly had increased gravity pulling them down.

Luckily, between the careful approaches they'd been making, the 5 metrons in which to react, and the soft ground they'd been aiming for, they landed without damage.

Then they started loading up.

The shuttles had scanned for likely sites before landing anybody, so the exploration and salvage squads were finding good salvage right from the start, and recording everything on video as they went. They could examine the writing, wall paintings etc later. For now they just recorded everything, even the partly crumbled remains of stone buildings and columns, for architectural curiosity if nothing else.

Early on, they found libraries, half-full of data crystals that had apparently been left behind as duplicates. They recovered every crystal for later cataloging and perusal.

They found some data crystals in other places, but the libraries were the best. It took them a little time to carefully dig the crystals out from under the dirt and debris that had formerly been shelves, but they expected it would be worth it.

On a short term basis, the thing that made the most impact on the fleet was the food. Not that they found any packaged food - that would be absurd after that amount of time, no matter what method of preservation was used.

But all food was ultimately made of plants and animals. And plants and animals can be remarkably durable or adaptable.

It turned out that even a planet abandoned because its sun was dying still had some life.

Oh, it didn't have much life compared to its best days, but some survived.

Most plants had trouble because sunlight, upon which they depended, was variable and unreliable. And as plants declined, so did the animals which ate them.

And the weather had apparently become unreliable as well - many parts of the planet were desert while others were flooded.

But here and there, in microclimates, they still found a variety of plants and animals, and brought back samples of each. They saved seeds from everything, and pairs, at least, of all types of animals, which they put into cryogenic storage.

Then they harvested as much food as they could.

The fleet loved that.

They had been on short rations the whole time they'd been traveling, except during the brief stay on Carillon. So the quantity and variety made a big hit.

Alfred's soldiers got a lot of practice on the planet generally, including in a skill they had not expected to need, and would probably never need again - a roundup. They got all the soldiers spread out in a big circle, miles wide, around a concentration of animals, and made lots of noise while slowly contracting the circle. The animals fled from the scary humans, of course, and stayed in the center of the circle as best they could.

But eventually the steady contraction of the circle of soldiers forced the animals to go to the one place where there were no humans - the gaping mouth of Liberty Ship 2, which still had wide open empty spaces for all 5 of its decks.

The animals rushed into the nice dark safe-looking space until they were all inside. They were carefully confined on the bottom floor by virtue of blocking the ramp to the second floor. When they were all in, the crew shut the airlock and trapped the animals inside.

Then rather than try to centralize the preparation and use of the meat, they distributed a few of the animals to each ship in the fleet, to be prepared and used by the inhabitants of those ships.

It wasn't an approach that emphasized strict fairness. It would have taken significant time to try to do that. So some ships ended up getting a bit more meat per person than others - a tenth of an ounce on average, and in once case, a full ounce per person more.

But instead of obsessing about fairness, in the time saved, they did another roundup. The second roundup had results very similar to the first roundup - it brought in over a pound of meat per person in the fleet.

The people of the fleet seemed happy with the results of the 2 roundups. Some even tanned the animal skins into usable leather, using ancient methods, since they required no special chemicals, but substituting exposure to vacuum instead of salting and drying. It was amazing how adaptable people could be.

Such a roundup was very bad for the ecology of the area, but they didn't figure that mattered on a planet whose sun was classed as 'dying' 7000 yahrens ago, and which wasn't getting any better. The whole planet was doomed beyond anyone's ability to reclaim, so they may as well get what use they could from it. The sun probably would not go nova for another couple thousand yahrens, but sooner or later, it surely would. When it did, the planet, and everything on it, would be toast.

So they had no qualms at all about collecting anything they could, including art objects in tombs - though they were careful to use simple robots there, since tombs were famous for having insidious traps and they didn't want to risk people unnecessarily.

While the Liberty Ships were taking off from Kobol to deliver meat and other salvage, they noticed that a lot of dirt clung to the ships - another effect of the gravity field extending past the ships' skin.

At first they viewed that as a problem, but then they realized it was a boon. The agricultural ships needed dirt, which was far more complicated stuff than just crushed rock - it needed decayed plant material and micro-organisms too.

And rather than dig some dirt up to be carried back to the agro ships, here they had tons of dirt - literally - many tons in fact, that had taken no time or effort at all to collect and would patiently wait on the ship's surface, in the atmosphere the ships gravity had collected the same way, until they needed it.

So they ignored the dirt and kept collecting other things.

Though the fleet had been most excited so far about the inrush of extra food, Alfred was excited about something else.

They'd found the shipyards that had been used to make the 13 fleets which evacuated Kobol - the ground-based shipyards at least. If they'd used orbital shipyards, they must have attached engines to them and taken them along.

While much of the shipyard equipment had left with those 13 fleets, many of the bigger machines had been abandoned and were still mostly intact, having been made of corrosion-proof alloys. The electronics, wiring, and many small parts had long since turned to dust, but could be replaced if you knew how.

When those machines were found, Liberty Ship 2, which was formerly Pod 3 and was still mostly open space, got dedicated, along with many work teams, to recovering as much of the heavy machinery as possible. At best, they could repair it and use it. At worst it was still good salvage.

Alfred realized he was going to need more space.

Pods 1 and 2 were already full when they arrived at Kobol. Pod 4, which had turned into Liberty Ship 1, was mostly full, except for its shuttle bay, whose space it was using to haul cargo up to Pods 5 and 6. And Liberty Ship 2, the former Pod 3, while it had arrived at Kobol entirely empty like Pods 5 and 6, was very busy recovering salvage and hauling it to Pods 5 and 6, and would be just as easy to fill as they would be.

So, realizing that the salvage at the shipyard, by itself, could fill up Pods 5 and 6, which were already on the way to filling with other things, he started frantically building pods 7, 8, 9, and 10 for more space. Not many opportunities like this came along, and he didn't want to waste the chance. Even assuming they could not get any engines finished in time, they could still tow that many pods along with them. The hulls, at least, were quick and easy to build, making it almost certain they would have them ready in time to receive shipyard salvage before the fleet had to leave.

While working at the shipyards, they also found the husks of some ships which had been left behind. As with the heavy machinery, everything but the corrosion-proof hulls, and portions of the engines, had long since turned to dust.

For 3 of the husks, the hulls were complete, as were most of the interior partitions and the massive blocks that formed about 70% of their engines.

While the ships certainly were not flyable, they could nevertheless tow them to orbit and refit the empty husks as usable ships.

So that got added to the to-do list.

The other one, or two if you looked at it that way, was a wreck - a small ship had apparently collided with a large ship shaped like a pyramid with a square base 400 metrons on each side. The combined wreckage had been shoved off to the side out of the way. The small ship was wrecked beyond any use or recognition. The large Pyramid ship had fundamental frame damage so extensive it would be easier to start from scratch and build a new one than to repair it. Easier, that is, if they had working machinery set up to do so. But it's huge engine block was intact.

So the combined wreck would provide much useful salvage, and, potentially, a large engine.

Additionally, they found some data crystals, which, given their likely content, Alfred had analyzed immediately. They included plans for ships and ship components, plus shipbuilding machinery, including the information they would need to repair the heavy machinery they'd found and the ship husks and engine they'd found. Much of the rest was not very useful, being much older designs and less efficient than the newer designs they already had.

The engines which the Kobol-designed ships used were an ancient design, with a low top speed, but they would still be able to go faster than the slowest ships in the ragtag fleet, so they'd be worth refurbishing.

And there were some other things of interest - some sensors that, while generally inefficient, could see reasonably well through the dust cloud that was the Void, a design for a ship that was also a shipyard - a Fleet Repair Dock, or FRD as they called it, a design for a very simple cargo ship built into a sphere, and the information on why the 3 ships were abandoned - unsolvable electrical problems. They'd have to start over on the electrical for those ships anyway, so that wasn't an issue.

Two of the ship husks resembled enormous scarabs 150 metrons long. The other was a Sphinx 300 metrons long. The data crystals, and the ships' structure, made it clear that the scarabs were intended as passenger ships, and the sphinx as a cargo ship. There were also plans in the data crystals for a passenger variant of the Sphinx ship.

As interesting as the ship hulls were, Alfred was more entranced by the possibilities which the sensors and ship designs suggested, and had people start looking into them first.

While Alfred and his people were thus busily engaged, Adama, the 'popular kids', and their only operational fighter squadron, piloted by newly graduated cadets since the regular pilots were not yet recovered from their illness, were landed at the capital city, looking for clues about the location of Earth.

It seemed silly to Alfred to have brought the fighter pilots, in their fighters, and have them park their fighters while they searched tombs. Anybody could search - not just Warriors. But it fit with the whole "Warriors are good at everything - flying and soldiering" idea, which the military clung to tightly, and Alfred had no influence over military deployments anyway, so he shrugged and ignored it.

Many of the Council members were down on the planet, making news videos of themselves in front of dramatic scenery and majestic ruins.

One, from Councilman Momet's faction, thought it would be a particularly good idea to get a picture with a snake wrapped around his head like a crown. Apparently he had no experience with snakes - he just thought they looked impressive and could be made to comply with his wishes. Unfortunately for him, he chose one that was poisonous, and was bitten several times. The trip to the shuttle proved to be too long, and he expired before medical help could be rendered.

They'd have a new special election within the week to replace him.

And he wouldn't be the only one replaced. Two more Councilors had been sightseeing in-between filming self-promotional news videos, and they'd chanced across a bin of artifacts recovered from a tomb by simple robots. Though they were warned that the items in the bin had not yet been checked for traps, they saw some they liked and 'appropriated them'. It was the last thing they ever did - the old Lords of Kobol knew of, and used some particularly nasty traps. It was gruesome - the Councilor who tried on a golden crown got his head bitten in half by that crown, and the Councilor who put on a jeweled necklace lost his head, as the necklace contracted - ratcheting its size down to zero.

Medical help was nearby, but there was no help for such injuries and they didn't survive.

Alfred was out working when he was informed of the deaths of the Council members. There was nothing he could do, so he shrugged and kept working.

He was personally evaluating an enormous accumulation of rust dust in the lee of a couple ridges, where a ravine, sheltered by the ridges it was up next to, had filled up over time with a vast amount of rust dust which had blown in and settled, when a Cylon scout patrol of 3 Raiders flew overhead.

He got in the LandRam and started making calls while his soldiers ran for their weapons. They had not been carrying anything heavier than pistols while they were working, since they planet had no significant threats - the few large predators could easily be stopped by a pistol.

A Cylon Raider could not.

So this Cylon patrol got out of range before Alfred's soldiers could open fire.

But Alfred's exploration and salvage groups were scattered all over the planet, so many had time to get ready after hearing the warning call.

So a number of Cylon Scout patrols got surprised by laser fire from LandRams, heavy weapons tripods, the massed fire of laser rifles set to continuous beams, and even whatever shuttles happened to be nearby.

Cylons do not react well when surprised.

So generally their scout patrols got taken out, losing a Raider or two when they first flew over a group of armed humans, then losing the other 1 or 2 as they turned to come back for a strafing run.

Some human groups had to dive for cover, and lost some equipment to Cylon strafing, but that aspect of the attack was soon over. The Cylon scout patrols all broke off whatever they were doing and started forming up for a massed attack, as soon as they detected the squadron of Vipers parked on the planet's surface near the capitol. Vipers were what normally stopped the Cylons, so a group which the Cylons could destroy while the Vipers were helpless, was a high-priority target.

Among the warning calls Alfred made was one to Colonel Tigh, acting commander of the Galactica while Adama was exploring the planet's surface.

Unsurprisingly, Tigh was busy. Alfred had to use his "Council Emergency override" to get through at all.

He didn't wait for Colonel Tigh to say anything like "I'm too busy with a battle to deal with you right now".

Instead Alfred quickly said

"You have more military forces than you knew. I'm transmitting data on them now. Sure, they're just armed civilian ships, but they are in the fight like it or not, so they may as well shoot back. Use them well. Out."

Then he called his ship to get more information himself. He couldn't do much more than make calls right now anyway, since the shuttles, all of which were armed, were being directed by Colonel Tigh already. He and the salvage team he had with him were far from the action, with no shuttle available to pick them up.

So his soldiers stayed ready in case any Cylons came along, while Alfred communicated with LowBoy.

He learned that a Cylon Base Star, with a full wall of 300 Raider fighters, had apparently followed Galactica and the ragtag fleet through the Void, staying just out of detection range most of the time. When the Cylons arrived at Kobol, the ragtag fleet was in orbit on the other side of the planet, and so were not detected.

So the Cylons had followed their standard search procedure and split up into about a hundred scout patrols of 3 Raiders each. These patrols had begin canvassing the planet when one had found the parked Viper squadron. It would have destroyed all the Vipers quickly, except that the planetary capitol was also a prime site for salvage and had several of Alfred's teams there.

That Cylon scout patrol got destroyed, but not before it called the rest of the Cylons to the prime target.

The situation was bad - a full wing of Cylon Raiders was a challenge even for Galactica with all its fighters launched.

But now none of those fighters had launched - most of the pilots were still in the hospital, and the rest - all new cadets - were on the planet's surface scrambling around and through ruins while exploring.

Sure, they had been alerted, and were hurrying as fast as they could towards their Vipers, but running is slow and so it was likely the Cylon Raiders would get in several strafing runs before any Vipers could launch, assuming any survived long enough, that is.

But Colonel Tigh was pretty good at his job.

He positioned his pieces quickly and gave them simple but effective orders.

Tenacity, having been built as a military Frigate, was the fastest ship in the Colonial fleet except for Galactica.

But Galactica, which was at the head of the fleet as usual, had to go much further than Tenacity did, in this case, to get to the battle.

So about the time the Cylons grouped up and headed for the parked Vipers, Tenacity arrived above and behind the Cylons, and stayed in that relative position while her laser turrets fired at the fastest rate they could manage.

Once she'd taken out half a dozen Raiders, a full patrol of 12 Cylons was sent up to deal with her.

But in an amazing display of skilled gunnery, she took out all 12, while taking only a few hits herself.

Then the entire Cylon force turned on Tenacity: while parked fighters are a high-value target for Cylons, they, following their usual program, presumed that since the fighters had not launched yet, that for some reason they could not, & therefore could wait until the ship that was actually shooting them got taken out.

And it would not take that many fighters long to take out Tenacity - seconds at most, once they got into range.

Tenacity turned and fled, while still firing, having longer range than the Cylons had.

Tenacity was fast, but fighters are faster than any large ship, so this race could end only one way.

But she fled past a group of 77 shuttles, moving like a shoal of fish, which Tigh had gathered and positioned near her path.

Cylons know that shuttles are no threat, so they ignored them while pursuing Tenacity.

At least, they ignored them until they opened fire and destroyed 34 Raiders in the first volley.

The Cylons then followed their standard procedure for when surprised by a significant force - they split up and attacked whatever they could, in a semi-random pattern.

But that's when Galactica arrived and entered the fray, followed soon after by all the armed ships in the fleet.

The fight was vicious and chaotic, but cleared up soon after the Vipers on the planet launched and joined in.

The fight was over. The Base Star snuck away without ever having been spotted.

One anecdote from the fight stood out to Alfred.

Apparently a Council member on the planet had narrowly avoided death when he tried to attract the attention of the Cylons and invite them to meet with him and discuss peace. They saw him, and strafed him, but a friendly human had pulled him behind cover just in time. It was lucky for that human that he'd helped from behind, then moved away afterwards - whomever he was. The Councilman never got a look at him,but had expressed a desire, if he should be found and identified, to prosecute him for assault and ruining a diplomatic opportunity. The experience had not changed the Councilman's views at all - he said it was a 'misunderstanding' that caused the Cylons to fire on him 'in the heat of the moment'.

Alfred took the event as a reminder to try opposing anybody who was campaigning for a seat on the Council who had no common sense. He set the wheels for this in motion before getting back to his main love - building things, or, in this case, repairing them.

A number of human ships were damaged, but all the Cylon Raiders were destroyed. They must have come in a Base Star, but apparently it had launched from long range, then fled - it was never seen, even by the scout patrols which went out looking for it.

Among the ships that got hit, was Liberty Ship 1. It took several hits from a Cylon continuously firing while he dove at it, though it was not seriously damaged.

The first Cylon hit impacted on, and burned through, the dirt which was clinging to her hull. Then 3 more hits burned through the turtle shell, 3 boiled off the water stored between the turtle shell and the hull, and one more hit the hull, damaging it but failing to penetrate all the way through.

The men declared it a very lucky ship.

Alfred thought it somewhat unlucky that a whole series of shots had hit in the same place. Though when he reflected on it, he decided it was lucky the dirt had been there. And in a way it was lucky that the Cylon came in straight and steady like that - it had made him easy to shoot down.

In any case, he had some of his people get to work on fixing it.

Several other ships in the fleet needed fixing, but he did not do anything about that, except the two which the Council decreed should be scrapped. Those two he sent people to fix, before they could be scrapped, since they still could not afford to lose any ships. The Council was judging by former standards, as far as what could and could not be repaired and how badly scrap was needed: neither of the ships really needed to be scrapped. They could be, and were, repaired.

Alfred's people didn't help with other repairs for 2 reasons. First, the Hephaestus could do it, being temporarily freed, for that purpose, from her normal duty of expanding accommodations.

And second, Alfred's people needed more time at the planet before the fleet left.

As soon as the Cylon attack was over, there were calls to leave, so they could avoid follow on attacks.

Calmer thinking prevailed, at least for now, when it was pointed out that it was one entire strike wing of Raiders & that's all a Base Star had, and that, even if the Base Ship was still nearby, Galactica and her Vipers could beat it if it attacked.

If there were more than one Base Star, they would have launched more than one strike wing. And any additional Cylons trying to come to Kobol would have to find their way through the Void, which was not easy and wasn't certain to succeed.

So it was judged that they had time to do the needed repairs, but they planned to leave right after that.

Sally had come running in with the news.

"Unc, They found Earth!"

"Tell me all about it." Alfred responded, as he gave the excited girl a hug.

"There's so much!"

Alfred sat back and motioned for her to continue.

"Adama and Apollo found the tomb of the last lord of Kobol and were searching it when they actually met Baltar there! After Apollo made Adama stop choking Baltar, Baltar made a pitch for us all to follow his Base Star back to Cylon and attack it, saying that it would work because all their forces were scattered looking for us. They ignored him, figuring it was some kind of trick, and I agree with them. But he followed them around, still trying to get them to believe him, until they all found the burial chamber of the last lord. Then the greedy slimeball opened the sarcophagus, saw the lord's scepter all shiny with gold and jewels, and grabbed it. I'll bet he wishes he hadn't, since a bunch of what looked like decorations on the scepter's shaft slithered into the flesh of his arm, and he fell down screaming. Apollo wanted to help Baltar, but Adama held him back. He'd read about this kind of trap, and he knew that to touch Baltar within a day would also infect whoever touched him. The old lords of Kobol were big into traps in their tombs and this is one of their worst - it's a little mechanical worm about the size of an eyelash - they burrow to your liver, kidneys and lymph nodes, which hurts a lot by itself, and damage them all as much as they can without killing you outright. The lords of Kobol wanted any grave robber to suffer more than a quick death would allow. So these worms do damage that makes you a lot more sickly, and, possibly worse, they wake up and attack again anytime you would feel happy. Any good feeling of any sort is normally accompanied by the brain releasing certain chemicals into the blood. The worms sense those chemicals and get extra active, wiggling and burrowing more, which hurts a lot!"

"Wow, that's pretty harsh. But can't they just surgically remove the worms?" Asked Alfred.

"Nope. They say that the worms have sensors so they can dodge any surgery - move away as the surgical instruments approach. Anyway, Baltar thrashed around and they dodged since they didn't want to get infected. But Baltar's thrashing around knocked over a chest of jewels which was in front of a tablet inscribed with information about Earth. They were worried Baltar would accidentally smash that, so they grabbed it and left. Luckily it wasn't trapped - probably since it was not inherently valuable - no gold or jewels there. They were headed back to the shuttle, to get back Galactica with the tablet, when the Cylons attacked. When they went back to the tomb the next day for Baltar, he'd left, probably the same way he came, since they couldn't find him anywhere, but did find where a Cylon shuttle had landed. They say that Baltar should last for many yahrens - most his normal lifespan, all while sickly, in pain, incurable, and never able to enjoy anything."

"Well, it's hard to feel sorry for someone who deliberately got most of the human race killed off, and has been actively helping hunt down the rest of us. But that's a rough enough fate that I almost can feel sorry for him."

"If you want to cheer up, listen to this - not all humans are like Baltar - when the attack started, the sick Viper pilots in the hospital went to Galactica's bridge and requested permission to launch. When Colonel Tigh pointed out that they couldn't even stand, Boomer replied 'the Viper is flown from the seated position'. They're amazing!"

"Yes, such dedication should be rewarded. I'll put in a motion to the Council about it, so it doesn't get forgotten in all the excitement. I hope to make it so that such extreme efforts are no longer needed - that we have enough defense resources to keep us safe without just barely scraping by like that."

"I know Unc. And maybe we can soon find Earth and be safe there."

"So did the tablet contain the right information?"

"It's all about Earth and, while there is a little uncertainty because they liked to use a lot of metaphors and such, they're pretty sure they know the direction to go and the distance. It's pretty far, but knowing the way is a big deal. Huge!"

Alfred agreed, they talked some more & then they both got to work. There was a lot to do and little time to do it. They needed to get as much salvage as they could, including especially the heavy industry from the shipyard, and get as many Liberty Ship engines finished as they could, before it was time to leave. While they could tow some engine-less ships, the fewer that lacked engines, the better.

Luckily, it was a lot easier to get folks to work, now that news of Earth had broken their funk and renewed their hope.

The extra food from the roundups also helped with folks' motivation and ability to work - being on thin rations tended to leave you with little energy, and having a surge of extra food both cured that and inspired a drive to try to continue to be well-fed.

Alfred had plenty of work for them to do, and he and his administrators were kept busy making arrangements and directing what should be done and how.

But they made sure to fit in some more food gathering. They discovered that the oceans were teeming with life, so they used another very effective technique that you'd never want to use in a normal ecology - at least not an ecology that wasn't going to burn up in a nova soon. For some reason, the technique was called "Dynamite Fishing". It was simple - you simply detonated a large explosive in a body of water, in this case an ocean, then collected the dead and stunned fish that floated to the surface. Fishing nets were among the first things which people had made corrosion resistant, once they learned how, so Alfred's folks had already found and salvaged several they could use for collecting fish, by simply dragging the nets along the water's surface behind shuttles.

With Dynamite Fishing, they got the fleet caught up on calories quickly, and also preserved a lot of fish for later consumption.

At the same time, and among the first things they did was to tow the 2 Scarab ships and 1 Sphinx ship to orbit, each loaded full of salvaged materials, and commence repairs on them, but more especially on their engines. But they hadn't made it very far in that when Alfred found out that the Council, with its 3 new members apparently fitting in well with the old ones, had already chosen ship administrators for each of them. Apparently they'd decided that no matter how much fixing up they needed, Alfred hadn't built them, so he couldn't choose ship admins for them.

So Alfred changed plans, called Ron at Hephaestus, and got the 3 ships transferred to Ron's repair queue.

The ships would still get repaired and put into service, though it'd take a while to clear out the raw materials stored there and thereby make room to finish them. And even longer for the Sphinx, since apparently the Council wanted the Sphinx built as the passenger version instead of the cargo version it was now.

But while Ron's folks worked on that, Alfred's folks would be able to spend time on other things.

He had just finished arranging that when Councilman Pike was summoned to appear before the Council.

There was no indication as to why.

So he hurried over to Galactica, went to the Council chambers, opened the door, and waited outside, since the ruling that he could neither come in nor speak until he apologized, had not been explicitly rescinded.

After a moment an aggravated voice said "Well, what are you waiting for? Come in here where we can speak to you!"

Alfred stepped in, and waited in silence while the Council censured him with various accusations, such as "irresponsibly putting civilian ships in harm's way", "foolishly wasting resources by building substandard ships", "thoughtlessly festooning everything with dangerous unlicensed weapons", and "inexcusably looting the planet".

This continued until, at length, Councilman Ari said "Your silence is insulting, speak up."

Then Alfred, now implicitly freed from the previous commands not to come back and not to speak, replied at length, answering all their accusations and then distracting them with a new proposal to stay at Kobol for a while - months or even yahrens. He made the points that the void was an excellent defense, making them very hard to find, and that the planet, though dying, was an almost ideal place to rest and refit for a while.

They scoffed - even the 3 new Councilmembers, who were also career politicians and apparently eager to fit in.

Alfred went on to add that, with the plans he'd found for sensors, human ships would be able to see through the void while Cylons could not, so any Cylons showing up would be at a severe disadvantage. That made this an excellent place to fight from, while they built up their strength.

They didn't accept his plans to stay, but it did cause some debate and distract them from any official action on the accusations they'd made.

He kept arguing in favor of staying, waxing eloquent about refurbishing local industry and using local resources to improve the human fleet and its situation, until they told him to get out and stay out.

Then he went to tell Adama the same thing, only to be told that he was back down on Kobol searching for more information.

So he sent him a long note.

He didn't hear back. Maybe the Council overruled Adama, or maybe he was just too busy right now to read it.


	9. Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Alfred could certainly understand being that busy - he was himself. He had many things to do, but let his managers and team leads direct most of it while he worked on a big new project.

He was working with the plans for a simple spherical cargo ship, which they'd found in the Kobold data crystals. Nobody was sure what to call "inhabitants of Kobol" - they'd apparently just called themselves humans, since there were no other humans at the time, but the term "Kobold" was catching on.

Anyway, the plans were beautifully simple, so Alfred was working on trying them. They started with a simple principle - find an asteroid that's pure metal, probably nickel-iron since that type is more common, then drill down to the center, place some water there, fill up the drill hole with the same metals, spin the whole thing by landing a couple shuttles, attaching them, and having them thrust in opposite directions, then once it's spinning, detach the shuttles, and start heating the asteroid.

If you were not careful, the outer layers would melt and be flung away by the spinning motion, before the inside got really hot.

That was bad.

But the Kobolds had done all the calculations about correct spin rate, heating rate, and which asteroid compositions worked and which didn't.

So, if you were careful, when you heated it enough, the water at the center would turn to steam and inflate the mostly-melted metal asteroid like a balloon. In one quick operation, you could get a metal sphere of any size. Sure there would be surface imperfections, some holes and cracks where steam had blown through, and things like that. But fixing such things was a lot easier than casting a hull the normal way.

And such a hull could store a vast amount of stuff from the planet.

So they set about it.

They didn't have any asteroids near here - the Kobolds probably used them all up long ago. But they did have vast amounts of rust which used to be vehicles, machines, tools etc which had long since corroded completely away. The rust dust from that one ravine would probably be enough by itself.

Rust powder didn't stay together like an asteroid did, but they soon had a solution - in a way, they would make their own asteroid.

But first they processed the rust back into pure iron, using some simple processes like electrolysis, and heating it in the presence of carbon, to make carbon dioxide. Then they added certain elements, such as Chromium, Nickel, Manganese, Vanadium, and Carbon, in the right proportions so that, when it all melted together and formed a kind of steel alloy, that alloy would be corrosion-proof and also have good heat conduction properties.

Metals like those had been hard to come by before they got to Kobol, but Kobol was providing a wealth of materials that were otherwise hard to obtain.

Then they were ready to begin.

In orbit above the planet they made a hollow magnet .8 metrons in radius, with its hollow core .66 metron in radius - about the length of a tall man's forearm. They filled the core with with water, sealed the filling hole, and set the magnet spinning. They added their powdered alloy mix, which was mostly iron - enough so that it all stuck nicely to the magnet. They added enough powder to bring the radius of the whole thing to 2.97 metrons.

Then, using lasers set on low power, they started heating this rotating sphere of powder gradually, according to the formulas worked out by the Kobolds, until the water in the center turned to steam, expanded by a factor of 1700, and inflated the mostly molten metal into a new bigger sphere. This left them with a new hollow sphere made of their alloy, 7.94 metrons in radius and .13 metrons thick.

That was stage 1. They had a couple similar stages to go.

For stage 2, they cut a circular access panel in the new sphere, went in and placed a new water core in it, radius 2.07 metrons and held exactly in the center by some temporary supports of the same alloy the whole thing was, and would be, composed of, then filled in more alloy powder around it until the sphere was full. They welded the access panel back on, repaired a crack that would have let steam out, spun the sphere with thrusters, and heated it the same way they'd heated the smaller one.

This sphere, when the steam expanded, ended up inflating the same way, to a new hollow sphere with a radius of 24.77 metrons and a thickness of .27 metrons.

Stage 3 was the same as stage 2, except this time the water in the center was 5.22 metrons in radius, and the resulting hollow sphere after the steam expanded was 62.32 metrons in radius and 1.32 metrons thick.

The final stage, stage 4, was the same, but used a water sphere with radius 16.75 metrons, and resulted in the sphere they'd wanted when they started - a 400 metron diameter, 4 metron thick, hollow sphere to use as a ship hull.

There were parts that were a bit lumpy or uneven, and a couple cracks, but mostly that didn't matter - the cracks they filled and reheated to weld them shut, the minor lumps they ignored, and the major bumps took a little time and care, but they fixed them too.

This they did by heating the area again and smoothing it by pressure, as a blacksmith would.

But they didn't use the sudden impact of a blacksmith hammer.

Instead they fitted shuttles with large plates and had fly them carefully up to the heated bump and make slow and safe contact between the shuttle's plate and the bumpy metal. The shuttles, once in contact, gradually applied thrust until the partially melted metal moved where they wanted it to.

Then, having the hull, or sphere 1 as they sometimes called it, in an acceptable final shape, they cut circular ports in it to serve as airlocks. These were actually 2 concentric rings - one sized to match the front of a Liberty Ship, so one of those could dock tightly to the new Cargo Sphere, and one ring just enough bigger to allow a whole Liberty Ship to enter. They kept the circular plates they cut out, and re-used them as doors. To open, the doors would recess into the sphere just enough to clear it, then slide parallel to the sphere, along its inside edge, to minimize the space it took to open the door.

As soon as they had the airlock doors cut and mounted, they sprayed a thin coating of ice onto the inside surface of the sphere, to stop and repel any semi-molten metal that went too far, then made another sphere, which they called sphere 2, inside the first. The first had a diameter of 400 metrons and the second, a diameter of 390 metrons.

They put in some quick brackets to hold the 2 spheres apart at the desired distance, then did the process again, making sphere 3 with a diameter of 370 metrons and inside sphere 2.

The airlock doors in each sphere matched up, with extensible tubes the whole size of the airlock between them, so a ship could attach to the outer airlock and load its cargo directly into any of the spheres, depending on which tubes were extended between which spheres.

Similarly they made sphere 4, diameter 355 metrons, inside sphere 3. Then made sphere 5, diameter 340 metrons, inside sphere 4.

They had planned to continue that way, dividing up the interior space in the sphere by making smaller, nested spheres, but as they were about to start the next one, the Council broadcast a message to all the fleet, saying the fleet was leaving Kobol in 12 hours - just half a standard day - whether ships were ready or not.

The "ready or not" part was almost certainly meant for Alfred, and he had no doubt they'd love to leave him behind by himself.

This put them in a mighty rush, and required some quick re-thinking.

They had already been working hard on finishing the engines for pods 5 through 10, and had actually gotten them done for 5 and 6. But pods 5 and 6 were already full of salvage.

So, since the engines and bridges were modular, they swapped the completed engines and bridges off pods 5 and 6, and onto pods 7 and 8. The incomplete engines and bridges then got put onto pods 5 and 6, to be completed when they could. They could tow pods 5 and 6 until then.

Then they did the same with pods 1 and 2, moving the bridge and engine from each of those onto pods 9 and 10.

LowBoy's engine and bridge would suffice to get her and her pods around until the bridge and engine on pods 1 and 2 were completed again.

So now, having pods 7 through 10 flyable and empty, they could rush to get in some more salvage in the time they still had. And the switch had taken only a couple of hours.

While that switch had been happening, they'd come up with a new plan for the ship made of nested spheres, and rushed to get it ready. They made one last sphere, sphere 6, nested in the center of the rest and 50 metrons in radius.

Into it they loaded in the ship's artificial gravity generators, set to radiate outwards in all directions as if the sphere was a small planet, and also the big engine they'd salvaged from the crashed pyramid ship they'd found in the shipyard.

At the same time, the quick brackets they'd put in place between all the nested spheres got augmented with sturdier more permanent brackets, and a whole lot of general finishing got done on airlocks, essential wiring etc. But only the most essential parts got done, so the Sphere Ship would be able to hold cargo and move. At first it would have to be towed, but it should be able to move on it's own before long - the engine had already begun the process of being refurbished about the same time they started on the outer hull of the sphere.

They also fitted forcefields around the airlocks, for faster loading. These they had only recently begun to make, having finally gotten all the machines they needed for it. They would hold in air or water, but allow denser things like ships and metal salvage to pass.

The inner 50 metron sphere would hold the engine, plus the necessary machinery spaces for power, gravity control, heating, conditioning and recycling the air, and so on.

It could do that because the Kobold-designed ship engines were reactionless - they did not need a rocket nozzle or equivalent to protrude from the ship. Reactionless drives worked fine, and had a very unusual set of parameters for what weight they could haul - basically meaning lots and lots within certain limits - but they were inefficient, using more energy from the fusion reactors and having a lower top speed.

Of course, the dilapidated ships of the ragtag fleet generally had a low top speed - the cargo sphere's top speed would be right about in the middle of the pack.

The cargo sphere had a vast amount of interior space, and they didn't want that capacity to go to waste. Especially not when there was so much here that they could fill it with. But they had little time, so they had to compromise.

Pods 7 through 10 each made one 'water run' to the ocean on Kobol. There they submerged & then opened the main airlock in front, plus one or both of the airlocks near the top, 60 degrees to either side of it. This let water rush in the front & air rush out the top. The process was fast, and as long as the stout doors to the bridge and engine room were closed, it damaged nothing. The pods were not finished enough for there to be anything to damage - the flooded areas were all bare ceramic.

Now filled with water, plus whatever else had been sucked in, some fish, plankton, algae, kelp etc, they went to the cargo sphere, and docked with the outer airlock in Sphere 1. With the airlock door to Sphere 2 closed, the pods then turned off their own internal gravity, resulting in all the water, fish, etc they contained being sucked into the Sphere by its own internal gravity.

This filled Shell 1 - the 6 metron thick space between Spheres 1 and 2, with water. They liked to do that for defense, since water blocked laser shots fine and was also useful as fuel for their Fusion reactors if needed. In this case, it could also potentially be a fish or algae farm if they got some skilled people to work it and the necessary support machinery built in time. And it could be used for drinking water as well, because the seas on Kobol were fresh water - apparently Kobol contained too little salt to build up and make the seas saline to any significant degree.

While they were doing that, Pods 3 and 4, aka the first two Liberty Ships, rushed to ferry salvage to the cargo sphere. They loaded in everything that had been gathered but not yet transported up, and carried it up to the cargo sphere.

They began by storing it in Shell 2 - the 20 metron high gap between Spheres 2 and 3. It had 11.55 times the total volume of a Liberty Ship, and they planned to fill it if they could, and, if they couldn't, they'd use any remaining space for a shuttle bay.

The process was similar - the airlock doors in Sphere's 1 and 2 were opened, in their larger setting to let the whole ship pass in, and the docking tube between those two airlocks was extended. So with the airlock door in Sphere 3 closed and the Liberty Ship docked tightly to the airlock in Sphere 2, they could turn off the artificial gravity in the Liberty Ship and let the cargo sphere's artificial gravity pull the salvage out, into Shell 2 of the cargo ship.

This worked well with general scrap and such, but they'd have to be more careful with loads containing useful machines & things.

On the first such load, they had an interesting side-effect.

Liberty Ships 1 and 2 had landed on the planet several times, and, because their ships' gravity extended 5 metrons beyond their outer hull, had acquired a load of dirt each time, which had gradually spread out over the hull's surface.

When they turned off their ship's gravity, the salvage had tumbled out into Shell 2 of the cargo sphere, but so had their load of dirt.

Dirt was useful in any case, since its constituent elements could be separated out and used. But this gave them an idea.

They hadn't been sure how they could fill up Shell 3, between Spheres 3 & 4, and Shell 4, between Spheres 4 & 5\. Each of those shells was 15 metrons high.

There just wasn't enough time to gather high quality salvage for them.

But they could fill them with dirt with no extra effort, as a side effect of bringing up other loads.

So while Liberty Ships 1 and 2 were bringing up general salvage loads, the plans for pods 7 through 10 got altered slightly. Before going back to the ocean, they made sure to land briefly on good dirt, to bring some of that with them.

Then they made more 'water runs' - 13 each, to fill Shell 5, the 240 metron space between Spheres 5 and 6. In these runs, they made sure to get as much as they could in the way of fish of all sizes, shrimp, crabs, oysters, plants and so on. The best place for that was next to a reef, so they sucked up as much as they could next to a few of those, then, on following trips brought the reefs themselves, or chunks of them as big as they could quickly cut off and fit in.

When they docked with the almost-innermost nested sphere - sphere 5, and shut down their own ships' gravity, not only did the water, fish, lobsters etc flow into that sphere, but the dirt fell off into the next shells out from there.

And though the dirt got soaked during its dip into the ocean, most of the water boiled off in the short time as they moved through the vacuum between the top of Kobol's atmosphere, and the Cargo Sphere ship, so the dirt arrived dry, though it would have been fine even as mud.

So as Shell 5 turned into a huge aquarium and fish farm, filled to the roof and with over 51 times the internal volume of a Liberty Ship, Shells 3 and 4, with 15 times the volume of a Liberty Ship between them, accumulated dirt, plus miscellaneous plants, seedlings, earthworms, and such, as are normally found in dirt.

They made sure not to fill Shells 3 and 4 all the way to the roof, since if trees were to grow there they needed room to do so.

And that was the plan now - Shells 3 and 4 would get watering and lighting systems, and have their dirt and air distributed suitable for growing trees. This would be nut trees mainly, in two levels. The taller Walnut and Chestnut trees would be intermixed with shorter Hazelnut trees, which could thrive in the shade of the taller trees. They chose nuts over fruit, because nuts didn't need as much care in handling and didn't have to worry anywhere near as much about spoilage.

Alfred's nephew Nate was able to take just enough time from his agricultural studies to show them how to accelerate the growth of the trees. It looked like some of the grass, bushes, and vines that came up with the dirt would also grow, at their own natural speed - Nate hadn't studied those yet and didn't have more time available even if he had.

The 13 water runs to fill up Shell 5 took the 4 Pods four and a half hours, leaving about 6 for loading heavy industry at the shipyard, which had already been detached and prepared.

And that was the next step. While Liberty Ships 1 and 2 continued, until the last possible moment, loading salvage into Shell 2 of the spherical cargo ship, Pods 7 through 10 landed at the shipyard to load in their final load - all the big machinery and heavy industry there.

It would be a tight fit and take all their remaining time, but, partially because all the smaller pieces had already been shipped up over the past several days, it would work.

The Galactica and ragtag fleet left while the Liberty Ships and Pods, LowBoy, and the cargo sphere were still loading. That was a judgment call on Alfred's part - all his ships were faster than the speed the fleet traveled at - which was the speed of the slowest ship of the fleet. And he'd built one set of Kobold sensors which could see through the Void. So he figured that, guided by those sensors, mounted in LowBoy, and moving at the best speed they could, they could delay a little longer to finish loading.

And even if something went wrong somehow with following the fleet, they knew they could find them again: the fleet was planning to make a beeline for Earth, and had distributed its coordinates.

When they calculated that they could not wait any longer for more loading, they set off after the fleet.

LowBoy could keep up with fleet with only 1 working engine, which it had, temporarily, while the engines on Pods 1 and 2 were being completed. It couldn't quite do it while towing Pod 5, as it must, but that Pod's engine could be completed before the fleet got completely out of detection range. And that would let them catch back up.

Pod 6 was being towed by Liberty Ship 2 and would have no trouble catching up to the fleet.

Neither would Liberty Ship 1, which was towing the rest of the large pyramidal ship they'd found crashed at the shipyard. They had cut up a lot of the crashed ship, and stowed those bits among their other salvage. That had reduced the size just enough so that it could be towed while the rest got cut up and stowed.

And Pods 7 through 10 were all working together towing the cargo sphere. It would lag behind the 2 Liberty Ships, yet be faster than LowBoy, until its engine was completed. That was calculated to be soon enough to not lose contact with anybody.

Having ships straggle along behind like that, all strung out behind the fleet, would normally have been suicide - the Cylon raids were frequent and they liked to pick off any stragglers. But in this case the Void would probably save them - neither the human fleet nor the Cylons could see anything in the Void. Only LowBoy was equipped with the old inefficient sensors the Kobolds had developed to see through the Void, in addition to her regular sensors.

But just in case, they parked armed LandRams, all of them, on the surfaces of the various straggling ships, as mobile gun turrets in case of need.

And Alfred tried a new thing as well: he'd been fascinated with mines ever since Carillon, where they'd had a delay while getting through its protective minefield.

Mines had long-since fallen out of favor generally - they were too easy to pick off, if you had time. They worked ok at a planet, where planetary defense weapons could shoot at anybody trying to clear the minefield. But otherwise they were not used.

But in the Void they'd be very hard to detect before they detonated. And when one detonated, it could destroy all fighters in a thousand metron radius.

Better yet, Alfred could easily replace the sensors the mine normally used with the Kobold sensors which could see through the Void. Then came a trivial bit of programming, so the mine would not detonate while a target was getting closer, but the moment it started getting further away again, the mine would detonate, if the target was in the blast radius. That would make it very hard for any fighter to escape destruction - the mine could see it before it could see the mine, and if it tried to get away, the mine would detonate and take it out. If a fighter tried to shoot down a mine, which was normally a simple task, the Void complicated that too - making it very hard to aim correctly.

The Cylons, like the humans, used fighters to scout ahead of their main ships.

So Alfred manufactured several dozen mines and laid them along their trail behind LowBoy. He knew they were the last human ship, so anything coming along that trail was almost certain to be Cylon. And he had shuttles drop a few mines just off their trail, slightly offset to all sides, to cover a wider area in case the Cylons were not precisely following.

The Cylons had been following them for a long time, so Alfred figured a few dozen mines were definitely worth the time and resources to build, even though they had so many other build priorities.

While they traveled through the Void, they had plenty to do, finishing the various incomplete engines, and setting up all kinds of systems and machinery. This went in order of need, and one of the first things was to make sure the aquariums, and proto-forests, in the cargo sphere had all they needed to survive and thrive.

That took a lot of piping, wiring, lighting, machines, vents, inner bracing and dividing walls and so on.

They also had to find people with the right skills to take care of fish, trees etc.

They built some cottages and tree houses among the growing trees, in the best looking area. Then they did the same for the aquarium, though these 'cottages' were underwater and strung along the lines of the support braces like beads on a string. 5000 cottages 5 metrons square and 2.5 high - the size of a standard room on a Liberty Ship - dropped the aquarium from being 51 times bigger than a Liberty Ship to being only a little over 50 times bigger.

Then they filmed them and broadcast the films, with an advertisement that any skilled workers that wanted to take care of these environments, and harvest food from them as it became available, could live there, as well as getting paid.

Mostly, the broadcasts went to the game units among the fleet, since not many had access to the ship communication and display systems. But the word got out.

Applications came in large numbers. Many of them actually did have the right skills.

They got hired and ferried back in shuttles.

Many of the unqualified were invited to visit and enjoy the open spaces and nature away from their cramped quarters, in exchange for a certain amount of the kinds of work they were able to do, such as stringing mesh netting to catch the nuts as they fell from the trees, and simple assembly work on the robots that would traverse the netting vacuuming up nuts for distribution to the fleet.

All of them were evaluated as they worked, and appropriate offers were made to them for other kinds of work they could do, if interested.

Alfred always needed more workers.

Work continued in those areas, and in stowing and organizing their cargoes, in finishing the pods as Liberty Ships, and in all the areas they'd formerly been working on, as they traveled through the Void and eventually caught up with the fleet.

Just before they caught up with the fleet, they had a commissioning ceremony for Pods 5 and 6, now completed enough to graduate from being mere pods, to being actual self-contained ships: Liberty Ships 3 and 4.

Liberty Ship 2, commissioned early, had also gotten to the same point - its bridge and engines had been working before, but not really complete. Now those were finished, and their machinery spaces crew and passenger cabins and all the miscellaneous things that made the difference between a bare ceramic cylinder and a finished ship, were in place.

Mostly.

Their work spaces - where factories or similar production facilities would be - were still crammed with salvaged goods. Those would be cleared out and replaced with machines gradually, as they used up the salvage currently stored there.

At the ceremony, Alfred was able to make an announcement.

"Friends, we've worked long and hard, and I wanted to let you know some of the progress we've made in addition to commissioning these two ships. We've always said that the 3 priorities of this fleet, given its situation, were Defense, Fuel, and Food, in that order, and that to achieve any of those, we first had to have more production. You know we've been doing that.

As for the need for food: with the new cargo sphere, which we won't name until it gets substantially completed and commissioned, we now have a tremendous amount of ability to grow food for the fleet: Shell 1 will grow things like algae and plankton to feed to ourselves, as well as to the various kinds of fish in Shell 5. I don't know the output numbers on those, or on the small fish and shrimp which naturally grow very quickly & so are what we're primarily farming in Shell 5, but I am assured it will be vast. Shells 3 and 4 are already beginning to grow nuts from several types of trees, thanks to advanced growing techniques. I am told by the experts that in the 187.57 acres those two shells provide as growing area, the two levels of nut trees alone will be able to provide 1,406,775 pounds of shelled nuts per harvest. And with the ideal growing conditions we can generate there, and the accelerated growing techniques and machines we have, we can get a lot more than one harvest per yahren. A whole lot more. Now that may sound like a lot of nuts, but divided among all 220 ships of the fleet, it's just a supplement, though a valuable one. Actually, to be accurate, we were 220 ships, then 6 got scrapped for parts to repair other ships. Then we came online and built 2, now 4, new ships with the commissioning of these 2 ships. Add in the 3 Kobold ships we recovered and Hephaestus rebuilt. Then these 2 ships represent a landmark - we're now at 221 ships - we've stopped declining and are now rebuilding."

A cheer went up.

"Thank you, but there's more. Growing algae and other small, fast-growing sea-life is not just for the outer shell of the cargo sphere - we will be doing it also in the water layer that the Liberty Ships have between their hulls and turtle shells. We can eat it, as well as feed it to fish or other livestock such as the ones in the fleet's livestock ship.

Also, the 'park levels' as Shells 3 and 4 of the cargo sphere are being called, will be producing more than just nuts. Many kinds of plants came up in the loads of dirt we recovered from Kobol. Some of those we are encouraging so they'll prosper. There will also be bees to pollinate and make honey, berry bushes, fruiting vines, grass, and mushrooms in the shadiest spots. These will all provide food, though, in the case of the grass, indirectly - we're introducing rabbits to keep the grass mowed and provide meat."

Another cheer went up. Many folks had given up eating well as a thing of the past.

"Thanks. Just a little bit more and then you can go to the reception and try some of our first nut harvest. Of the 3 priorities, food is partially addressed, as you can see. We have also been gearing up to produce ship engines - the ones that don't use tylium. We'll be swapping those into the ships of the fleet as fast as we can, so that what tylium we have, and can find, can all go to the military ships, especially the fighters. That's what we can do about Fuel. Then for Defense, you know we've been building laser turrets and installing them where we can, as fast as we can. That's definitely a help, as are the armed shuttles and LandRams. But you all know that, when it really comes down to it, our defense is really handled by our Viper fighters. Everything else helps, but those carry the main load. Even Galactica depends on her Vipers.

Well, we're always expanding production, of course, and have now reached a new level - we can finally build Vipers."

A bigger cheer went up.

Alfred briefly touched on the continuing production of things like laser turrets, ship engines, shuttles and LandRams as needed, Home Production items including game units, Mr Former and Mr Crystal, parts to finish more pods as Liberty Ships, Fusion energizers for energy, gear for their soldiers, and as many more and better machines as they had room for, to increase production even further.

He finished

"After all that - all our priorities, comes comfort - including nicer and more spacious housing among other things. Though with any ship we build, we may as well build it right in the first place, which is why the rooms in the Liberty Ships are about the size of a good bedroom back on the Colonies, or fully 12 times as big as some folks in the fleet currently have. We want to help them too, but better housing space that gets blown away by Cylons, or gets stranded for lack of fuel, or contains starving people, isn't worth much. But we will get to it in its proper order."

He didn't get a cheer - folks didn't like being reminded of how tough some folks still had it. But he did get a murmur of approval.

The crowd was dismissed, and they all went to sample the first foods grown in the cargo sphere.

As Alfred's ships left the void, they were spotted by the rest of the ragtag fleet.

Moments thereafter, Alfred was called before the Council.


	10. Chapter 10

Chapter 10

The Council had not even given Councilman Pike a chance to talk - they'd just censured him the whole time he was there.

They'd heard about the ships Alfred had armed helping to defend Kobol against attack, of course, but they'd been too rattled and busy, before now, to react.

And their 'carefully considered' reaction? They'd told him it was an 'irresponsible waste of resources' to build laser turrets - that those electronics were needed for "higher priorities than 'pseudo-military' adventures, which dangerously risked civilian ships", and ordered that he wasn't allowed to do that anymore.

This put Alfred in a difficult situation, since several of the Ship Administrators in the fleet had taken the opposite view - they had seen the effectiveness of the laser turrets, and asked Alfred to build some for them.

But Alfred thought he saw a loophole.

He asked for and got a transcript of the Council meeting, then searched it. And indeed there was a loophole - what they had banned him from was using electronics in laser turrets. The ban was not on laser turrets per se. And they had said nothing about Optronics.

So Alfred got his folks working on Optronic laser turrets. In some ways, that was a boon - they still had limited production of electronics, and now that they could produce Vipers, which had to use top-of-the-line components from end to end, all their electronics could be used for Viper production.

So making more of the standard laser turrets would have been difficult anyway.

But making Optronic ones would be easy. The Home Production system was really going well, turning out all kinds of output, and growing. And what it made used Optronics.

So they geared up for making laser turrets using Optronics.

They hadn't built any yet, nor quite caught up to the fleet, when the next Cylon attack came. Usually their attacks came from behind, since they didn't know where the ragtag fleet was going, but they could detect fuel residues indicating where it had been, and follow those as trails.

And that's how this attack came too - from behind. The Cylons had used their trail as a path out of the Void.

Alfred's ships were all clustered together, well behind the fleet, so they were what got attacked.

And apparently the Cylons liked to hit big ships, since the Cargo sphere, the biggest in the group, by far, at 84 times the volume of a Liberty Ship, got at least 90% of the Cylon's attention.

In all the hurried efforts to stow salvage and finish the ships, Alfred's people had not yet moved the LandRams off the surface of the ships, where they were put to be out of the way, and to provide extra firepower at need.

And now, when there was need, they did very well.

This Cylon attack would be classed as a minor formation, at 36 Cylon Raider fighters. a Patrol was a third that, while a Cylon squadron was 75 fighters.

So the 36 Cylons all made strafing runs at Alfred's ships, mostly hitting the big Cargo Sphere, while getting shot at by his laser turrets, LandRams, and the 3 shuttles, all armed, that had happened to be in flight at the time.

Liberty Ships 1-4 each had 6 laser turrets, as did pods 1 and 2 attached to Lowboy, and pods 7-10, which flew independently but were not complete enough to christen as ships yet. Those, plus the 2 laser turrets on LowBoy itself, and the 3 armed shuttles totaled 65.

The Cargo sphere had no laser turrets, but did have 54 LandRams, which were all armed with lasers just as long ranged and only a little less powerful each.

Alfred's 119 guns were somewhat inexperienced in combat, but blasted away enthusiastically, and, even if they missed almost three quarters of their shots, were still grinding down the Cylon force effectively.

They were just getting 'into the groove' as they called it, when Tenacity arrived and destroyed the last 2 Cylons.

Vipers from the Galactica arrived just after that. They got the alert at the same time as everyone else, but the pilots had to get ready, get to their Vipers, launch and traverse the distance from the front of the fleet where Galactica was usually positioned. In the same time, the Tenacity had only to turn and move. And it usually stayed near the back of the fleet. It's bridge was always manned, and its engines always running. And, though it was mostly a hospital ship now, it was built on a Frigate and still had a Frigate's speed, which was almost equal to a Viper's.

So, as for rapid reactions go, a Frigate like Tenacity would always be able to get to the action first, unless the Vipers were kept constantly in flight, which you couldn't do due to pilot fatigue and fuel issues, if nothing else.

Alfred took note of that for his future plans. He also decided that all LandRams should always be manned, and kept on the surface of his ships. Without them, the fight would have been much harder.

They'd taken enough damage as it was.

All the Liberty Ships had taken a hit or two each. They'd lost nothing - even the outer Turtle shells had not been breached, though those shells had been damaged and would need simple repairs. 'Simple' repairs, because all they had to do was add some more of their ceramic material and heat it up sufficiently to fuse the patch with the rest of the shell. There were no wires, conduit or anything else in the shells to complicate things.

Similarly the Cargo Sphere's outer shell was solid metal, not pierced for anything but the airlocks, which were just as thick as the rest of the hull. With no complications, except a couple sensor clusters by each airlock, its hull would be just as easy to repair - just add alloy, then heat it to fuse the patch with the rest of the hull.

And it would need a lot of patches.

It had been hit over a hundred times. Her hull was thick enough to require 4 or 5 hits in the same spot to pierce it, but that had happened in one place - not just 4 or 5 hits there, but 7.

And that had been dramatic, since the next level under the outer hull was the 6 metron thick band of water where they were farming algae and plankton. Water absorbs laser hits really well - some flashes to steam and billows out, and more flows in where the vaporized water was. So there had been a tremendous burst of steam, followed by escaping water - evaporating rapidly as it got exposed to vacuum. This looked like a mortal hit on the sphere, but really only cost them some of their algae farm.

It could have been worse - some of the process to divide it by sections had already been completed. They'd been putting in dividers along lines of longitude and latitude to divide the algae farm into at least 24 sections, so in case it got hit, they wouldn't lose the whole farm.

The dividers were not all in yet, but they did limit the loss to 1/4 of the farm. That was not a trivial amount of water and algae. The farm had a volume of 1,452,986.62 cubic metrons, or 3.7 times that of a Liberty Ship.

While 363,246 cubic metrons of water rushed out the hole, they'd learned a couple things.

First, steam messes with laser beams, and water vapor does it even better. The beams get diffracted, diffused, and scattered - especially so when it hits bigger droplets of water that then flash to steam and further disrupt the beam. Lasers do damage because the light is coherent - that is, extremely orderly, and brief laser pulses make all the laser energy arrive at once, maximizing the damage. Water in any form interacts with light, and chaotic water, like steam or scattered water droplets, introduces chaos into the laser beam, effectively weakening it, since its energy gets spread around a much large area and some of it sent in wildly different directions. An afternoon of sunlight may give you a first degree burn, but it will not kill you, as it would if the same amount of light energy arrived as a laser beam pulse - focused and instantaneous.

Second, they learned that snow makes good armor versus lasers. Much of the water, freezing when it hit the cold of space, had fallen back onto the surface of the cargo sphere, because its gravity extended out 5 metrons beyond the ship's surface and so tended to capture a lot of water that would have escaped. While water evaporates rapidly in vacuum, snow does not - that's what comets are - big snow balls, more or less.

Some later shots had hit this snow and flashed it to steam, but inflicted no actual damage on the ships hull beneath. At least, not where the snow was thick enough.

So, while they'd taken many hits, repairs would be fairly simple. The hardest part, which wasn't very hard, was keeping the snow out of the way while they patched the holes.

Alfred's group of ships rejoined the ragtag fleet, and soon thereafter their shuttles had brought back enough comets to not only refill the part of the algae farm that was lost, but also coat all his ships in a nice thick layer of protective snow.

It made some things harder to deal with. Sensor masts had to be extended a bit so they'd not get covered by snow. Laser turrets needed protective 'walls' made of ice to keep the snow back so it didn't interfere with their operations, and so did airlocks. And the LandRams had to be adapted as SnowRams - getting treads instead of tires - so they could still traverse the surface of the ships.

But that was it. And it was judged to be a small cost compared to the extra safety gained.

Meanwhile, they'd completed the first 2 dozen laser turrets based on Optronics, shipped them to 4 other ships who'd asked for them, and installed them. The installations took longer than electronic laser turrets, since those were self-contained units that had their own computing power and sensors at each turret. The Optronic turrets had that too, but, since optronics were slower and less effective than electronics, these new turrets were also plugged in to the ships' own sensors and computers which were, of course, electronic. That way, the less efficient Optronics could be in standby mode, inactive but ready to take over if needed, while the ships' superior electronics handled the coordination of turrets, acquisition of targets, tracking, aiming etc.

And while they were installing the turrets, they took the opportunity to show the ship admins the Council order which Alfred had snuck through on arrival at Kobol, allowing them to upgrade the ships' airlocks and docking mechanisms to better accommodate docking some Vipers. Then they did the upgrades. This took the form of something they called a "docker" - to each single docking mechanism on a ship's hull, they added an adapter that looked something like a flower - a single shuttle or Viper could still dock to the center of the 'flower', but now each of the 6 'petals' could also dock a shuttle or Viper, though the petals were optimized for Vipers - allowing them to insert the front part of the fighter - all the way back to the engines, into a special airlock designed for that. This would allow pilots to get in and out faster, and some maintenance to be done without having to go outside wearing a spacesuit.

They also routed fuel and power lines to the new dockers, to more quickly refuel and service Vipers and shuttles.

And while installing dockers and turrets, they measured the ship's engines, so they could build pre-Marron drives to replace them. They planned to build the replacements, then take the ships under tow briefly while installing the new drives. The more ships they could do that to, the more tylium they would save.

They were busily making, among the usual things, more turrets, dockers, and engines, when the Council called Alfred back in.

The door to the Council chamber had hardly closed behind him when they started in on him for "weakening our defenses by using substandard weapons", "selling shoddy equipment", "building false hope with inadequate obsolete equipment" and other such statements, each twisting the facts to make Alfred appear guilty of gross malfeasance when in fact he was doing the best he could to improve the general defenses of the fleet.

Really, all he was guilty of was generally pissing them off.

Still, as bad as it looked for ever getting the Council to see reason, Alfred gave it a shot when it finally became his turn to speak.

He cleared his throat and began

"Councilors. You are seeing this as an 'all or nothing' situation - that is, either we build the best that can be built, or we build nothing at all. That is folly. They say 'beggars can't be choosers' meaning that in certain situations you take what you can get and be glad you could get it. We're in such a situation. Yes, the laser turrets run by old-style Optronics are less effective than top-of-the-line electronic ones. But they're not much less effective, and not at all once they're plugged into a ship's existing sensors and computers. But what's more important is that we can make lots of Optronic ones compared to few electronic ones. Is it better to have many turrets at, say 70% effectiveness, or very few at 100%? I'll give you a hint: if, for example, we could build 5 new advanced laser turrets and run out of parts for any more, or do the same and also build 15-20 less effective ones using older approaches, then clearly we are better protected overall if we accept non-optimal but still effective approaches. Sure, 5 of our best turrets may shoot down 10 Cylons in the time it takes 5 less-effective ones to shoot down 7, but they *will* shoot down those 7. And every bit of extra defensive capacity helps."

He took in a breath and continued.

"Similarly, my ships are using the old style star drives - the ones that were used 2 centuries ago before the Marron drive was introduced. Sure they are bulky and less efficient, but they have 2 advantages - they're easier to build and they don't use tylium, which is, and always will be, in short supply. They can get by just fine with hydrogen fusion. So while it takes more iron & other basic materials to make them, and it makes the ships bulkier and slower than our fastest ships, we can save rare tylium and still easily keep up with the speed the fleet has been traveling. Better yet, ships using pre-Marron drives can go scouting for tylium without using up any tylium, thus conserving it for where it is important. And every bit of tylium we can save helps - we are using it much faster than we are finding more.

So again, an older technology is actually well suited to our circumstances."

He saw the disagreement on their faces and sighed as he finished up.

"If that wasn't clear enough, then consider a simple example - a bicycle. Bicycles, as you knew them back on the 12 worlds, were made of advanced composites & optimized for lightweight strength, minimal wind-resistance and maximum durability, but that isn't the only way they can be built. Even a crude bicycle is better than nothing and will get you to your destination much faster than walking. And that's true whether you are considering a few sacrifices from the optimum, or a lot. Even in the worst case I can think of - a bicycle whose frame is made of wood and which has rigid wooden wheels and simple wooden cogs rather than a chain - even that bicycle will get you to your destination faster than walking. It will be a bumpy ride and take you more effort than a lightweight composite bicycle would have, but it will get you there. And you would be a fool to turn down such a bicycle and walk simply because you could not have a top-of-the-line bicycle.

That's where things stand - we'd be fools to turn down useful technologies that, in our situation, help us significantly, and build nothing simply because we could not build the best."

The vitriol coming back at him from the Council was as irrational as it was vicious. There was talk of charging Alfred with contempt, to which he responded

"I respect each of you, fully as much as you deserve, and no further. Of course you wouldn't ask more than that, since, to do so would be venal, which is certainly behavior beneath a Council member, right?"

Apparently a logical, reasoned response to that was beyond them, so they made personal attacks based on solely emotional arguments.

The problem with emotional arguments was that they proved nothing - no matter how emotionally worked-up you could get over any issue, somebody could get just as worked-up over the same issue in the opposite direction. That had been tried ad-nauseum with the war: one side made emotional arguments that war was destructive and painful and hurt many, with the other side emoting about vengeance for the dead, justice versus the Cylons, and protecting the children. Both sides had truth in them, but the truth in each was just window-dressing, appearing to lend support to the main thrust of emotion. Each side seemed to believe that if they felt more strongly about the issue than the other side did, then they won the argument. And all that did was escalate, with each side emoting more and more strongly until there was a total breakdown of communication, with fistfights, or worse, anytime the issue was brought up.

Thinking about that distracted Alfred from the wave of venom coming at him from the Council.

Eventually the Council decided that it would make them look bad to bring any formal charges against Alfred, so they let him go with a vicious tongue-lashing.

He went back to work, blowing off the incident as par for the course with career politicians who were, effectively, totally divorced from reality and common sense.

While they got to work on the new engines for the 4 ships they'd measured, Alfred addressed the problem of how to empty out Pods 7-10.

These were stuffed with very large machines from Kobol's shipyard, and there was nowhere to put them, much less set them up and use them. So they could neither finish those pods as Liberty Ships, nor use the heavy industry machines.

Not yet.

But there was that plan the Kobolds had had for a Fleet Repair Dock - a ship that was basically a huge tube, with factories and workspace built into the very thick walls of the tube, with the hollow interior of the tube available for assembling whole new ships, and set up with cranes and other machines towards that purpose.

It was a complex and enormous ship design, but Alfred had an idea for adapting the concept and making it easier to build.

There was much to consider, so he called in his factory boss Floyd for a consultation. There wasn't a soul alive who was more practical than Floyd, and few, if any, with more experience in building things. If he looked it over and thought it could be done, then it would be worthwhile to call in the designers to iron out the details.

Floyd greeted him with a casual

"Hey Boss, What's up? Are those the ship plans you mentioned?"

"Hi Floyd, I haven't got any plans worthy of the name - nothing detailed like schematics. Just some concept drawings, but please look them over and tell me what you think."

As Floyd moved to do so, Alfred continued.

"As you can see, it's a very simple approach - we just take 12 Liberty Ships and dock them side to side in a big circle, actually a hexagon 3 ships on a side, given where their side airlocks are. Then, since this will be for long-term use and the airlocks may not be strong enough to stand up to that, we strengthen the whole thing by basically making an enormous circular plate, with 12 holes around the outside near the circumference, each sized to exactly fit a Liberty Ship. We also leave a big hole in the middle of each circular plate, so I guess I should call them rings instead. We make 3 of these rings and slide them over our 12 docked Liberty Ships to stiffen the whole thing and take any stress off the airlocks."

"So it looks like 3 cardboard circles, with 12 pencils stabbed thru the circles, and each circle has a big hole in the middle?" Floyd asked

"Yup, more or less. The circles are at front, back, and middle, such that we can just back a Liberty Ship 'into its slot', through the 3 holes aligned for it, then clamp it in place and be done, more or less. Then, the same way we made the outer tubes for the Liberty Ship cylinders and turtle shells, we make a much bigger tube sized to fit the outside of these rings. That'll give even more stability to the whole assembly, and some protection."

"Boss, if we're making one tube, we should make 2, with a water layer in-between, like we did between the Liberty Ship hulls and turtle shells. Then they'd have enough protection to use all that space inside - and that's a lot of space."

"Good point Floyd, then we could have all the space in the middle, between the 12 ships, available for ship assembly, since all the big machinery making parts and sub-assemblies could be set up 'outside' the ring of ships but inside the big tube. Let's call those the Inner Work Area and the Outer Work Area for reference."

"So now our bundle of pencils stabbed through cardboard circles are all inside a soda can on its side, more or less, but with holes at the flat ends of the can?"

Floyd asked.

"Exactly. We'll use the same ceramic that we build Liberty Ships out of to make the whole thing. We'll need lots of odds and ends like dividers in the water area between the tubes, and flanges between the ships, along their lengths, to seal ship to ship and form them into an airtight inner ring for safety. We'll hinge the flanges like big doors, and leave them open normally, but have them close automatically, both via motors and via air-pressure, in case of emergency, like if the outer tubes get breached.

For all of it, we can use the same continuous extrusion machines that we use now for Liberty Ships, though we'll need more of them in order to build this and keep building Liberty Ships at the same time. The hardest part would be big forcefields covering the holes at the front and back holding in air for the entire thing, plus smaller forcefields doing the same thing across the holes in the front and rear rings. With those, the entire area inside the 'soda can' as you put it, can contain air and be usable workspace, with smaller areas doing the same as backups for safety."

"So", Floyd asked, "If the Cylons shot it, they'd have to penetrate the outer turtle shell, the water behind that, and the tube behind that, before the Outer Work Area would lose atmosphere. Then, depending on where they hit it, they'd have to shoot through an entire Liberty Ship, or one of these flanges, to breach the inner work area?"

"Yep, though it's not 'If' the Cylons shoot it, but 'when'. And when it gets hit from the front, the shot will be weakened by one or 2 forcefields before it hits anything solid which will probably be a 5 metron thick ceramic disk anyway. Nothing's perfect by any means, and the Galactica, for instance, could absorb a lot more punishment than that, but it should as safe as we can reasonably make it, and certainly safer than any other ship in the fleet except the cargo sphere."

"Sure, I can see it, though maybe it'd be better to put a third tube around it all for another layer of protection.

But why put Liberty Ships in it at all - why not just treat the outer tube and the rings as a cylinder - a big new kind of Liberty Ship - add engines, and finish the interior?"

"If we were back on Scorpia, that's exactly what we'd want to do." Alfred responded. "It'd be more efficient in the long run. But out here on the run, we have to make do with what we've got. In this case that means limited build facilities, limited design ability, and limited time, since we can't be sure when a big Cylon attack will arrive and take us all out if we're not ready by then. And that means we go with standardization and simplification as much as possible. A Fleet Repair Dock, or FRD, of any design, will need things like engines, power, gravity, and accommodations for its crew and workers, as well as lots of work space to manufacture the myriad small parts that it takes to build ships. Liberty Ships already have all that. They're utterly standardized, and highly simplified, so we can make them as fast as possible. And as we gain experience at it, we're building them faster and faster. If we plug a dozen of those into these rings and tubes, then the rest is comparatively trivial - just install the machines & start them up, mostly."

"So, for the same reasons, it won't be another sphere?" Floyd asked, not because he didn't understand, but because he was good at prodding Alfred to think everything through.

"Right, but also because it'll be a lot easier to fly a new ship out of an open-ended tube like this, than out of a sphere. In fact, it could even be used for major repairs rather than just new construction. Right now we repair ships as best we can, towing them if we have to. But with this, we could pull up to a severely damaged ship, even if it was in 2 halves or otherwise really messed up, and 'swallow them whole' so to speak, as long as the damaged ship is smaller than the FRD. We fly so the damaged ship goes in through to open front, secure it in place, and repair it while keeping pace with the fleet, even if those repairs are major."

Floyd nodded, thought a moment, and asked

"So the thing won't have it's own gravity or engines?"

"Nope, and that's an advantage. Building engines that size takes a lot longer than just cranking out 12 engines sized for Liberty Ships. And the engines in those 12 ships are big enough to haul it all, plus whatever ships it is building as it flies along. And while it will have gravity inside each of its 12 Liberty Ships, outside them it won't. That'll make it easier to handle the big heavy parts that go into making a new ship."

"Ok so far", said Floyd, "but what are we gonna use it for? We can already build Liberty Ships without it, and those are all-around useful ships. If every ship in the fleet was a Liberty Ship, we'd be much better off than we are now."

"True, we can work and live in Liberty Ships, and produce all kinds of stuff we need there - now even algae to eat, in the water layer. But they are not dedicated military ships, and we'll need some of those if we're ever going to be able to defend against the Cylons, or even push them back. We can't just assume what we have now is a stable condition - it has to end one way or another, and I'd prefer it end with us all staying alive. Military ships will help a lot with that. The Borellians have asked for 2 more Frigates to work with Tenacity in a 3-Frigate formation they used to use. We could build those in a FRD. And I'm looking at some other designs too."

"It looks like it will have a lot of usable space - roughly 25 times the inner volume of a Liberty Ship in the Outer Work Area and 21 LS volumes in the inner?"

"Yep, about that. Though the final design team hasn't looked at it yet & their ideas may change it a bit up or down. Whatever it works out to be, it will give us to room to set up and use all those shipyard machines we got from Kobol, as well as build new ones to replace functions not already covered - not all their machines were corrosion-proof." Alfred answered.

"Admit it - you really just like the idea because it is named FReD." Floyd teased.

Alfred just laughed.

Floyd examined it a moment longer and concluded.

"It's crazy, but it will work. I like it. When do we start?"

They called in the design team and got to work refining the idea.

Then they started as soon as they could, starting off by collecting some asteroids to make ceramic from. Most of the Kobol salvage was more specialized and valuable than that - such things as working machines, repairable appliances or furniture, plus lots and lots of various metals they didn't want to use for this job.

But asteroids were plentiful.

In ways, it was an easy build, since the major components could all be built at once, after they made some more continuous ceramic extruding machines, that is.

But they built the big rings before the tube, so they could build the tube around the rings and attach it as they went. The new Liberty Ships, 8 in all since they planned to use Pods 7-10 as the last 4, were begun at the same time.

It looked pretty silly to be towing such a collection of basic shapes - cylinders, tubes, disks and whatnot.

They had not yet started to assemble it all when the Cylons attacked next.

A full squadron of 75 Cylon Raiders fighters swept in from the rear of the fleet and attacked the closest ships - Alfred's.

The Cylons concentrated on Pods 11 and 12 as they approached, apparently thinking them to be disabled ships under tow for repairs and therefore easy kills.

And kill them they did - dramatically. Those 2 pods were, at this point, nothing more than big ceramic cylinders without a turtle shell - they didn't even have their major floors in yet to stiffen the structure.

That was probably why they broke in half, spewing very large amounts of water and leaving miscellaneous chunks of ceramic drifting in several directions.

Then the Cylons concentrated on the biggest nearby ship - the cargo sphere. They hit it over 150 times before the Vipers from Galactica arrived and finished off the last 26 Cylons - all that were left at that point. The laser turrets on Alfred's various ships, plus all the LandRams on the cargo sphere's surface, and the shuttles in flight, had all blasted away as best they could. And they'd been joined by a company of 200 soldiers. They'd been training on the surface of pod 1 with their laser rifles and backpack energizers, and their officers had simply commanded them to aim and fire, as if it was a continuation of the training exercise. With their beams set to continuous, each hit only blasted a daggit-sized chunk out of whatever Cylon it hit, but the hits were easy to get - especially when several beams cooperated to make it impossible for the Cylon to dodge. Sometimes a hit like that would just impair the Cylon's ability to fly, making it easier to hit again, but sometimes it would hit something vital and disable, or even detonate, the Cylon fighter.

And Alfred's folks had hardly begun firing before Tenacity had joined in, blasting away with her usual consummate skill - scoring fully three times as many hits per gun as anyone else.

So the Cylons were reduced by about two thirds before the Vipers got there - Battles happen fast and pilots take a while to get to their craft, launch & then fly the length of the fleet.

But, late as they were, the Vipers would have been invaluable in defending against a larger number of Cylons. And larger numbers did attack whenever the Cylons got a good fix on the fleet's location.

Alfred had noticed that the Cylons didn't bother shooting at the armed shuttles, suggesting their targeting priorities were such that, if bigger more valuable targets were present, they went for those.

So no shuttles would need repair or replacement.

Most of Alfred's ships had taken a few miscellaneous hits to their protective snowpack on the ship's surface, and 2 would need minor repairs to their turtle shells.

But that was from stray shots.

Pods 11 and 12, and the cargo sphere, had been the Cylons' focal points.

The remains of Pods 11 and 12 would simply be collected, ground up, melted, and re-extruded. That was only about a day of effort, which was all that had gone into them before they got shot.

The hits which the cargo sphere had taken were scattered over all its surface, since Cylons tended to split up when fired upon. Consequently, it had not received enough hits in any one place to get through its snowpack and outer shell. It would need a lot of surface repairs, but it's functions were not impaired at all.

Of the Cylon fighters which the Soldiers had hit, some were intact enough to be recovered as salvage for their raw materials and rare metals, but one was mostly intact.

And it gave Alfred an idea.

After making the mines they'd left in the Void around Kobol, they'd made a few more in case a good opportunity presented itself.

And this seemed like a good opportunity - after all, what was a Cylon Base Star likely to do if, while following Galactica's trail, it came across a Cylon Raider fighter that appeared to be disabled but only lightly damaged? It seemed like there was a very good chance it would recover it to repair it and re-use it.

So they carefully hid a couple mines in the Cylon fighter, and cast it adrift, to be found by Cylons when they came this way and hopefully destroy a number of them, or damage the Base Star, when it exploded.

The hardest part was in connecting the mines to the fighter's passive sensors and programming the conditions under which it would explode - they wanted to hurt the Base Star if at all possible, yet still go off if a cautious leader ordered the wreck examined.

They figured they'd done a good job, yet they'd probably never know.

A short time after the attack was over, Commander Adama distributed a fire plan to the armed ships which gave each ship a couple zones to cover with their laser turrets. It let each ship focus on their own target areas, rather than try to watch everything.

It also coordinated their fire to try to catch any Cylons in a crossfire from 2 or more ships, making it more likely that they'd get hit, while keeping the ships in the fleet safe from stray shots.

It looked like it would be genuinely helpful.

And the plan was extensible, so as more ships got armed, they could be fitted into it.

Since they were completing and emplacing a dozen new laser turrets each day, that was a very nice feature.

That was with all of the Home production system devoted to making more laser turrets, and to expanding itself.

Liberty Ship 1 had all of it's production devoted to making Vipers and Training Vipers, completing one each per day.

Liberty Ship 2 was devoted to making ship engines: pre-Marron drives for Liberty Ships and for replacing the Marron drives on ships of the ragtag fleet. The output on that varied with the ships' required engine sizes, and was hard to predict, since each ship only got measured for replacement as it got its laser turrets installed. But its output of Liberty Ship drives was roughly one every other day.

Liberty Ship 3 had its production devoted to making and outfitting more Liberty Ships - currently the 8 destined to fit in to, and make up, the Fleet Repair Dock.

And that left Liberty Ship 4, and LowBoy with its 2 pods, to handle all the miscellaneous other production they had to keep up with, and devote any spare production after that to working on the FRD.

Pods 7-10 were currently too packed with large heavy machines from the Kobold shipyard to do any production. But as soon as those machines could be moved to the new FRD, they'd get their own factories and start using them.

So things looked bright, in general, except for the latest nonsense from the Council.

There had been a steady stream of applicants from among the fleet to come live and work in the new Liberty Ships of the FRD.

But after the latest Cylon attack, that stream slowed to a trickle, as the Council used images of the destroyed Pods 11 and 12 to spread FUD - Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, about the new ships.

When Alfred looked into it, he was surprised to note certain numbers - with the completion of his new Liberty Ships, his total space for passenger accommodations would exceed that which the Council had been working on expanding and improving - not just exceed it in number housed, but each person it in would have 4 times as much space as the people in the Council's expanded quarters.

When he thought about it, though, he realized that what the Council was doing was quite difficult - their workers had to analyze the structure of each ship they intended to improve, figure out where they could extend it to make more space, and then re-work the interiors to divide up the new space. Every step of that process was unique for every ship, and consequently time-consuming. Worse, every step had to face unique challenges, like building around, or re-routing, existing power lines, vents, plumbing etc.

By contrast, Alfred's Liberty Ships were simple and standardized, so they could be built far more quickly than all the custom work the Council was having done.

But the Council had apparently realized that the Liberty Ships could make them look bad. And they certainly didn't want Alfred Pike, of all people, 'stealing their thunder'.

The Council could not forbid people from moving in as long as the people themselves, and the ship admins from their old and new ships all agreed. So the Council used propaganda to try to make people unwilling to move.

And, as career politicians, they were quite experienced at lying by telling parts of the truth, and also at using careful phrasing to imply that something was obviously true, when it wasn't actually true at all.

So the Council, among other things, used pictures of the destroyed pods, plus lots of loaded phrases like "substandard deathtraps" to scare folks away from wanting to move to any Liberty Ship. They strongly implied, at every opportunity, that the Liberty Ships would fall apart at the least bit of damage. They didn't say that outright, since it was demonstrably untrue. But their strong implications were enough.

Alfred called Floyd to consult, but the consultation ended up being very brief.

Floyd advice was very simple: "The best cure for lies is truth. But folks who have bought lies don't want to face the truth and realize they were wrong. So you have to rub their noses in it to have any chance of getting through."

He made a couple suggestions, and Alfred agreed.

First they looked up the Council's planned schedule for upgrading passenger accommodations.

They found the last few ships on that schedule - the ones furthest from being upgraded, contacted their ship administrators, and made deals with them. They traded away, as payment, a little spare tylium which they'd collected, or some minor repairs, for the Ship Admins to assign some of their crew to work, for brief stints, on Liberty Ships. While folks were generally unwilling to live in a Liberty Ship, it was a lot easier to get them to work there by day, for a couple days.

Using the same methods, they got the Ship Admins to require their passengers to tour a Liberty Ship, once each.

In doing so, the visitors saw that the Liberty Ships had large accommodations available, that everything was in good repair, and that each had some luxuries, like showers and stoves, which were scarce on other ships. Then, as the visitors were in the shuttles to head back to their tiny cubicles in old dilapidated ships, Alfred had a demonstration. While the visitors watched from a good vantage point, an armed shuttle would deliberately shoot the nearby Liberty Ship 2-3 times - just enough to get through the snow and damage the Turtle shell. Then the visitors were invited to tour again and see if they could find any damage inside the Liberty Ship.

Nothing could speak louder than that on the subject of the Liberty Ships' toughness. That many hits would severely damage almost any other ship in the fleet - pretty much anything but the Galactica, Tenacity, and Alfred's ships.

Fusing in some replacement ceramic to repair the turtle shells took only centons, so the demonstration cost very little, but it gained a lot.

People could see the reality didn't match the propaganda.

Word spread quickly among the visitors & all those they knew. It was confirmed by crew from their own ships, who'd worked a couple days on the Liberty Ships and so could verify that it was the reality of the day-to-day situation and not some kind of show - not a brief presentation of something idealized and at its best just for the presentation.

That fixed the situation.

Applications to come live and work in the Liberty Ships increased again to the steady stream they had been, and more, despite folks having to sign a contract.

Specifically, anyone moving to a Liberty Ship had to sign a contract agreeing to work there. The contract was fair - they'd work standard, generally accepted shifts, and get paid for their work. And they could change jobs or quit at any time. But if they quit they'd have to leave the ship.

Alfred could do that because, while according to rights decreed by the Accommodations Committee of the Council, living space was free and could not be sold, but the right to move to a ship was up to its ship administrator, with few exceptions. And contracts were enforceable.

So he was required to give equal living space to each person on his ships, but he didn't have to let anyone move to his ships.

He required the contract, because he needed workers, not idle refugees, as many folks in the fleet had lapsed into being.


	11. Chapter 11

Chapter 11

They were just having a ceremony to christen the first formation of 12 Training Vipers when the next Cylon attack came. But the attack was over too quickly to disrupt the ceremony much. One Cylon patrol of 12 Raiders appeared suddenly and tried to ram the cargo sphere. All but one got shot down. That one left a dent in the outer layer of the cargo sphere, but did not penetrate.

The dent was not deep, and would have been difficult to repair, so they left it as it was.

Because the cargo sphere got attacked more or less constantly, some folks started calling it the "BattleSphere".

It would not officially be named for a while yet since, at about 80 times the volume of a Liberty Ship, it was taking a while to complete, despite being mostly taken up by aquarium and forest.

The Training Vipers were either a success, or a failure, depending on your outlook.

If they'd been designed as competitors for Vipers or Cylon Raiders, they would have been failures, since they were quite a bit slower or less maneuverable.

Luckily, that's not how they were intended.

As a training vehicle to familiarize new pilots with flying and prepare them for the Vipers they would fly, they looked like they'd be a great success.

Alfred and his designers had wanted to keep the Training Vipers as similar to Vipers as possible, while burning Hydrogen in pre-Marron drives instead of tylium in Marron drives, so they could get in a lot of training hours without impacting their fuel supply.

And it looked like it would work well.

A regular Viper has 3 engines at the back: engine 1 is lower right, engine 2 is lower left, and engine 3 is above the other 2. All are top-of-the-line Marron drives - the best, most optimized versions which humans knew how to produce, so that the fighters would have the best performance possible.

For the Training Viper, they needed to use pre-Marron drives instead, so that they could be flown often without impacting the supply of rare tylium.

That was the whole point.

Pre-Marron drives are either bulkier or heavier, take your pick. And either route you go, they have less maximum output - only about 80% that of a Marron Drive.

And they needed the Training Vipers to have similar performance to real Vipers. Otherwise they training would not be worth much.

They'd looked into it and found that it couldn't be done. So they settled for similar maneuverability, but slower top speed, since that would provide better training than the other option - the same speed and lower maneuverability.

They'd had to expand the engine configuration, so that it could manage even that. But Alfred's designers had finally come up with a plan that worked.

While engines 1 and 2 were normally inset into the fuselage a bit, and ended about where the cockpit began, in the Training Viper they were not inset at all, but moved outward just a bit so they could be extended forward. And extended they were - each one to about 3 and a half times its original length, so now it extended to the nose of the fighter.

In the space between them and behind the cockpit, there was now room for another engine, of the original Viper engine size, as long as they ducted the engine input and output vents a bit, to go around the fuselage.

This new engine they numbered 4, then added engines 5 and 6, also of the same size as the original engines, to the left and right of the top engine - engine number 3.

So, where a regular Viper's engines, seen from the back, formed a triangle pointed up, now there was another triangle of engines superimposed on the first, but pointing down.

Between the 3 new engines and increasing the size of engines 1 and 2 by a factor of 3.5, a Training Viper had 11 times the volume of engines that a regular one did. And given that the pre-Marron drives each weighed 30% more than the same size Marron drive, they weighed 14.3 times as much, between them, as one regular Viper engine.

The fuselage and wings weighed the same as those on a normal Viper, and were mostly unchanged.

Then add in all the extra bracing necessary to hold all this together despite the strains it would undergo while maneuvering, and a Training Viper weighed 3.46 times as much as a normal Viper.

But it had the same 'footprint' - taking only the same hangar space as a regular Viper did, since none of the new parts extended past the points where the wings and nose formerly extended.

There were some very minor changes to the wings, so the 2 laser cannon would not be in the way of the longer engines, but mostly they kept it as similar as possible, so it would be good training.

A big difference was necessary to make it just as maneuverable as a normal Viper, which was that engines 4,5 and 6 were set to thrust in reverse by default, and had to be computer controlled for that to work right. So, with the computer's automatic help, a pilot simply pulled the control stick left, right etc and the computer figured how much reverse thrust to apply to which engine, or combination of engines, and which ducts to send the thrust through, in order to make the craft turn that way at the requested speed. In that configuration, the Training Viper was just as maneuverable as a normal Viper, but only 43% as fast, if maneuvering, or 62% as fast flying in a straight line.

It could also be configured in flight, by merely telling the computer that you wanted Speed Mode instead of Maneuverability Mode, to have all engines thrust forwards. In that configuration, it was only about half as maneuverable, but could reach almost 85 percent of the maximum speed a normal Viper could.

So it wasn't something you'd want to take into combat, where it would have significant disadvantages in either mode, but it could be flown endlessly without impacting the supply of tylium, and would provide good training for flying the real thing.

As a side-benefit, it had greater range than the normal Vipers did, since tylium could not be compressed, but Hydrogen for Fusion could be. And with all that weight expansion, they'd been able to fit in a small extra fuel tank.

Alfred's new pilots were advanced enough in their flight training to use the new Training Vipers immediately. Indeed, the launch of all 12 was the planned conclusion of the christening ceremony. They actually launched 11 then.

One of the overeager training pilots had launched early, to try to help shoot down the 12 Cylons attacking the cargo sphere. That fight was over so quickly that he wasn't in flight yet before the last of the Cylons rammed the cargo sphere & was destroyed.

But his efforts did spark plenty of reminders that the Training Viper would not likely be much of a match for Cylon Raiders. Not, at least, unless new tactics were worked out to accommodate their low speed. And it seemed unlikely that such a speed discrepancy could be counteracted by tactics or maneuvers.

Alfred had trouble understanding pilots sometimes.

He went back to building.

The Fleet Repair dock was coming together - all the ceramic pieces were in place, even the third tube that Floyd had suggested for greater durability in combat.

So it was now a big cylinder, with its shell made of 3 tubes and 2 water layers in-between those. Then 3 rings, or disks with central holes, formed its ends with one more in the middle - stiffened it and providing 'slots' for the 12 Cylinders of Liberty Ships, with flanges in-between them to make an inner airtight cylinder between the 12 ships. Those 12 were already in their slots, even though the new 8 were just husks as yet - they had all their ceramic parts done, and basically nothing else.

Yet.

Work was proceeding on all the rest of it, and Alfred already knew what ships it would build first, when work was effectively shut down: The Council seized all his shuttles.

Without shuttles bringing in asteroids and comets to use as raw materials, the supplies of those, for both Alfred and Ron at Hephaestus, would run out very quickly.

So as soon as the last Council Security goons had left with the shuttles, Alfred shifted priorities, and started using his production and remaining supplies of materials to start making more shuttles.

He could figure out how to justify it, or hide them, later. But they had to get started on them now to minimize the lost production time.

Getting around the Council on this issue looked like it would be quite difficult.

Simultaneously with seizing the shuttles, so that Alfred could have no time to react, they had decreed that Alfred had been "Hoarding a National Resource" and implied he'd been using them unfairly, no matter how he'd actually been using them.

They said that central direction would be more efficient and avoid any "irresponsible and selfish uses".

It sounded like the Council were determined.

And they had no sooner taken the shuttles than they set up new duties for them. Now the shuttles were to fly a continuous bus service between all the ships of the fleet and the 2 ships - the Rising Star, and the Silver Swan - where the Council had recently built new gambling and sports venues, and a "lounge".

This they said was "crucial to the morale of the fleet".

Most of the shuttles would be dedicated to that operation, each serving 2 ships, for which they would function as taxis - taking folks between those ships and the the bar, casino, and sports arenas on Rising Star and Silver Swan.

But 10 shuttles got reserved as the personal armed limousines of Council Members.

Alfred figured the whole thing was largely another attempt to buy votes - giving the people of the fleet something they'd notice and like, in hopes that would increase support for the 10 Council members that voted for it.

And those 10 were making certain that everybody knew they'd voted for it.

Without constant shuttle runs, the Home Production system shut down almost immediately - folks could neither receive new materials to process, nor ship back parts and finished goods.

Alfred made sure to explain the situation via broadcasts to their game units, and offered that, though they couldn't work, that was not their fault, so their game units would stay active while the problem got sorted out.

Many people appreciated that.

One 70 yahren old Lawyer and avid gamer named Cecil, called Alfred back and offered legal advice. For now they could think of no specifics, so really it was just an offer for later. But Alfred gratefully accepted it.

Without Shuttles, they also could not fly workers who lived in other ships between their homes and their jobs. That had some impact on Alfred, who still had a supply of materials he could use up.

But it had no impact on Hephaestus, which ran completely out of materials almost immediately: without materials they could not run their machines & so it hardly mattered that they also could not get workers to and from their jobs.

Alfred could have docked any of his ships to Hephaestus for direct transfer of materials, if he'd had such materials to spare.

But, of the kinds of materials they generally used for building, he didn't have much on hand.

They had acquired a lot on Kobol, but had been rapidly using it since then. And until they'd left the Void, there had been no asteroids or comets to replace it. So stockpiles were low. That had been ok while they still had shuttles to go collect more asteroids and comets, but was a real problem now.

They did have some stuff they'd rather not use for general building - things like salvaged Kobold small appliances and furniture, which they'd rather refurbish than melt down. This they queued up to use anyway, in case they could not find a better solution before they ran out of other materials.

They also had vast amounts of special alloys they'd gotten from the crashed Pyramid ship, would be a waste to use as anything other than military-grade ship hulls.

But in general, he had only enough materials to complete a batch of 23 shuttles, to hopefully get them started collecting more materials again.

He considered sending out one or more ships to collect any asteroids the fleet passed close to, but rejected it because it was specifically illegal for a ship to leave the fleet, even briefly. He'd have to work on that.

They kept their eyes out for any asteroids the fleet passed close enough to so they could collect them anyway. But the fleet tended to avoid those as navigational hazards.

Luckily it was only raw materials that were scarce.

The water layers on all Alfred's ships, which had been installed largely to absorb incoming laser fire, and later been pressed into serving double-duty growing algae for food, could also serve, at need, as huge fuel reservoirs for the fusion-powered pre-Marron drives.

So they would not run out of fusion power anytime soon.

Alfred was spared actually having to solve the problem.

It solved itself, in a way, in just 2 days.

People of all sorts were screaming at the Council because all production had stopped.

Ships were not getting upgraded, or even repaired, anymore, sparking fears that the practice would resume where damaged ships would be scrapped for materials and overcrowding would consequently increase.

Folks in the Home Production system stopped working after hours - they'd been making things for sale and a new economy had grown up around that. But now that economy sputtered and failed.

Ships stopped getting armed even though Cylon attacks were steadily increasing. This worried everyone, as did the fact that Viper losses were no longer getting replaced.

These and other problems were constantly communicated to the Council, as loudly as possible and by every means possible, and from every possible source.

The Council had wanted to be popular, but quickly discovered that the move was making them very very unpopular indeed.

And their efforts to lie about the causes of the problems failed - not only had the truth gone out to folks on every ship of the fleet within centons of the shuttle seizure, but they had confirmed it by publicly taking credit for what they'd assumed would be a popular move.

So the Council reversed themselves - mostly. They released the shuttles, but only about half. And they did so with an announcement aimed at preserving their dignity as much as possible. The 'fig leaf' announcement, as it came to be known, said things like 'usage does not yet support that level of service'. In other words, it claimed that they'd made the right decision, but that they didn't need that many shuttles right now, so they released 50.

But they released them to Ron on Hephaestus, not Alfred.

The Council probably did not realize it, but that was fine with Alfred - Ron had a good head on his shoulders & promptly got the shuttles doing the same things Alfred would have had them doing.

So raw materials began to flow again.

And, in response to Alfred's news broadcast to all the game units, Cecil the Lawyer called him back up and said this was good news in more than one way - the way Alfred may not have known was that the return of shuttles to Ron now formed a legal precedent which would justify Alfred in having and using his own shuttles.

So the 23 shuttles that Alfred's folks finished the next day went right into service.

Since he didn't have as many as he had before, the first materials they brought back went into making more shuttles. It would not take them long to catch up.

And with the extra Silicon from those first raw materials collection runs, they built the husks of two more Liberty Ships, just as places to keep plenty of spare raw materials in event of need.

They didn't intend to finish them - not for a long time if at all. They were just to store materials in & would be towed until further notice.

This came with a side benefit of attracting Cylon fire away from more valuable ships - the Cylons definitely preferred to shoot ships that were apparently disabled, as these appeared to be.

That wasn't a problem, since it was easy to repair them, and collect any bits that were blown free.

While there were no shuttles to organize and administer, Sally had taken over similar duties in charge of personnel.

She took to it like a duck to water - she liked people, was fascinated by them and enjoyed organizing them and filling needs.

And there was a ton of that to do, with the 30,000 new people coming on to fill the 12 new Liberty Ships which would form the FRD.

When Alfred, unsure whether she really meant it when she said she liked the new duties, asked "are you sure"

She responded "I love it - people are INTERESTING!"

Alfred then asked "Are you sure you're really related to me?"

They both knew Alfred understood machines far better than he did people, so they laughed and went on about their duties.

Satisfied that she didn't need or want a chance to go back to shuttle admin duties, Alfred left it alone. Sally then appointed her former assistant to the role of shuttle master.

On Cecil's advice, Alfred, as Ship Administrator, set up some new laws for his ships.

They amounted to this: Anyone armed, who didn't already have a pass signed from Alfred, on arriving at any of Alfred's ships, would be warned before they left their shuttles, but if they left anyway, would be subject to whatever level of search was deemed necessary, up to and including a strip-search.

And anyone at all arriving on Alfred's ships could be quarantined, at his sole discretion or that of his guards, for 2-7 days before being allowed contact with anyone on his ships.

It was worded generally and claimed to be for safety and disease-prevention. But really it was a very lawyerly way to poke a finger in the eye of the Council Security goons if they showed up again.

That made Alfred feel a bit dirty - he didn't like lies or unnecessary rules. But he put it in place anyway, as the most justifiable and defensible way they could think of to mitigate the damage should the Council try something like the shuttle seizure again. At least this way they'd get 2-7 days to work on a solution while the Council Security thugs sat, unarmed, in quarantine.

Things were getting back to normal. They were at almost full production again, and managed to get new pre-Marron drives installed on 4 ships of the ragtag fleet, before the Council Security goons actually did show up, claiming that their visit was a routine inspection.

As their shuttle approached LowBoy, the new list of Laws for the ship was transmitted to them. They received the list, but did not reply or comment.

When their shuttle landed in the docking bay, Alfred and 2 assistants were there to meet them.

It went badly from the start. When Alfred asked them to submit to search and quarantine, they just laughed and pushed forward into the ship.

"What you're doing is illegal." Alfred protested.

The head Council Security goon responded

"No such thing - we can't break the law - we ARE the law. The Council says that anything we do while on Council business is OK with them."

"That's illegal too. I should warn you that everything you do or say is being recorded"

"Stop that immediately." the goon arrogantly ordered.

"No, it is my legal right." Alfred calmly replied.

"No it isn't."

"Yes it is - I'm on the Council and have read the laws."

"That doesn't matter - the Council will support us regardless - they always do and especially in this case, because they hate you".

"That's as may be, but it is still my right - it's the right of all citizens." Alfred persisted.

"I say it isn't your right, and I order you to stop anyway, whether it is or not." the goon blustered.

"That order is illegal - and in any case, I can't stop - it's all being recorded at the computer center, so there's nothing I can do here to stop it."

The head goon, followed immediately by the other 7 goons, pulled out their guns and pointed them at Alfred and his assistants, then said

"Take us to the computer center - we'll need to confiscate and inspect that footage."

Still calm, since he had faced guns before, Alfred replied. "No. That order is illegal too."

"Take us now or we'll shoot you and confiscate it anyway, then make up a story where we had to do it and are legally justified in doing everything we end up doing."

Alfred took them, while lecturing them the whole while on all the laws they were breaking and informing the whole group of Council thugs that if they supported illegal actions, they were guilty too. None of them stopped what they were doing, nor showed the slightest willingness to do so.

Alfred didn't like going along with armed threats, and had no intention of just giving in. But he escorted them along the hallways of his ship knowing that as time went by, they would lower their guard, even if just a bit, and opportunities would arise.

Besides, he knew that, at some point, help would be arriving - security cameras are not much good unless someone is watching them. The help wouldn't be from their soldiers, since they were currently on the forest levels of the cargo sphere, practicing camouflage techniques. But they had plenty of other guns on the ship, as well as people willing to use them at need.

Soon enough Alfred, his 2 assistants, and the 7 Council Security guards - they'd left one guarding their shuttle - rounded a corner and came in sight of the secure and guarded room where spare game units were stored.

On seeing the armed guard by the storage room, the Council thugs wasted no time.

Neither did the guard.

But the Council thugs already had their weapons out, and the guard did not.

So the guard was hit twice and went down before he could bring his weapon to bear.

Alfred and his assistants started to act, but immediately had pistols pressed against their heads by other Council goons who said "do anything at all and you die right now."

With the guard already down, and the fight over, starting a new fight when the goons were ready for it would have been a bad idea. Any action on Alfred's part would simply have been suicide.

So he let the situation calm down, waiting for a better opportunity.

3 Council thugs stayed with Alfred and his assistants while the other 4 broke into the room and ransacked it.

While they did, Alfred had time to consider.

He recognized that his guard was not dead, though he probably would not be able to get up and fight soon either.

The guard had been wearing the same armor that all of Alfred's soldiers received, which was designed to take laser hits and survive.

Lasers impart energy to the target - a large amount of energy - but energy can be a funny thing.

If you put your hand against someone and push, you're using all the same muscles and forces - imparting all the same energy - as if you had punched them. But the push isn't likely to bother them and the punch is.

Lasers are like that - given the same general capacity, it does more damage if you deliver all your energy at once, in a pulse, than if you spread it out over time in a continuous beam. So laser pulses are generally more destructive, and the military went with them in their weapons designs.

But that has downsides.

Momentum is what carries a physical projectile like a bullet through various layers of the target, until the projectile either uses up its momentum, goes all the way through, or is destroyed in the process.

Laser beams have no mass, and therefore no momentum, so they penetrate poorly.

Laser pulses liberate all their energy on contact - it's all surface interaction - they have no ability to penetrate things beyond flash-heating, to vapor, the material they contact, plus maybe a bit of material next to that if it's heat transmission properties are right for that.

A continuous laser beam continuously vaporizes new material, so it 'digs a hole' which approximates penetration.

But a laser pulse, when it hits, mostly looks like an explosion - all its energy is transferred to the material it contacts, plus a little stuff next to that due to complex heat-exchange equations. That material heats up. With a military laser that heating is so fast that the material goes from solid form directly to gaseous form, aka "vaporizes". This happens extremely rapidly and closely resembles an explosion - a rapidly expanding cloud of hot gasses. The things closest to the explosion are affected just as with any other explosion.

The energy content in one laser pulse will only do a certain amount of heating - either a lot of material will heat less, or a little material will heat a lot more.

So the small amount of material in a balloon heats up tremendously and you get a violent and hot explosion.

The armor the soldiers wear takes that into account - the Nysteel and Polymesh under the balloon layer are best at dealing with impact, like from an explosion.

So while someone wearing such armor gets thrown around by the violence of the explosion, that is mitigated by the armor too. And bruises or broken bones are a lot easier to recover from than having chunks of yourself vaporized.

The guard at the storage room had been hit twice - once in the chest and once in the leg.

The chest hit was first and looked pretty dramatic - the balloon layer vaporized and the resulting explosion knocked the guard backwards into the wall, where he hit his head and was knocked unconscious despite the protection his helmet provided.

Alfred had seen that there was no blood from that hit.

The second hit was to the guard's leg, and unfortunately it hit on a seam between two balloon compartments. The compartments vaporized, using up much of the energy of the hit, but some of it went to the underlying layers and blasted a chunk out of them, and the guard's leg, knocking him flat onto his face and spraying blood around.

But the wound was just oozing blood - not pouring out like a hit on an artery or vein would.

So the guard would survive, even if ignored a few centons, as seemed to be necessary if Alfred didn't want to be shot by the trigger-happy Council Security thugs.

Those thugs seemed to be very much on-edge - it was almost no time before they came out of the room again, carrying the equipment that ran the security cameras covering this hallway and the storage room itself.

Of course, those cameras also had their output routed to the main security room, and were recorded there as well, but Alfred did not think it would be wise to mention that - not when the guards seemed to think they'd seized all recordings of their actions.

In addition to the security camera recording equipment, the guards had also loaded themselves down with boxes of game units. They said they needed them for 'evidence' - as if Alfred had stolen them instead of manufacturing them.

It was just a thin excuse for looting, and when the first group of thugs got back, the rest of the thugs hurried to get their own boxes full too.

They all kept their pistols in one hand while using the other hand to balance boxes of game units against their chests. This was awkward - taking concentration to maintain and also blocking a portion of their view.

And that was the opening Alfred had been waiting for.

Once all 7 guards were loaded up and escorting Alfred's group, apparently defeated and docile, back towards the shuttle bay, Alfred, having been talking the whole time about laws and rights, added

"And here's another thing that's my legal right - concealed carry of weapons."

Though of course he'd already fired before finishing the sentence - there's no point in giving them warning once they already had their guard down.

Alfred's assistants had seen him take out his concealed pistol, and had taken out theirs as well.

Alfred's party of 3 had to fire quickly to take out all 7 guards, but the guards were so bogged down in their loot that it worked out - all 7 were hit and stunned before they could get off any effective shots.

Alfred's assistants took the stunned goons' weapons as Alfred called the bridge to update them on the situation.

He'd barely begin talking before crowds of armed workers arrived from 2 directions - the folks watching the security cameras had put the word out and volunteers had been gathering to ambush the thugs. They were a little late, but still very appreciated.

Some volunteers took the thugs to the brig to be locked up, while others carried the wounded security guard to the medical facilities to get his leg looked at.

Shortly, almost everybody was on the way to the shuttle bay where the last Council Security thug was guarding the shuttle he came in.

As they entered the bay, it became clear that the delay had made the thug nervous enough to grab a hostage.

He was behind his hostage with his pistol to her head, and both were behind cover - halfway hidden behind the edge of the shuttle.

The moment he saw Alfred and his crowd of workers, the jittery thug shouted "Come any further and I'll kill her!"

Alfred paused and said "You can't be serious."

The guard, even more agitated now, yelled "I'm deadly serious - give me the security recordings and let us go or she's dead. I know she is your niece, so you'll do what I say."

Alfred, ever calm, replied "I meant you can't seriously be thinking that this will work - you have a gun and a hostage, but do you have eyes in the back of your head?"

The thug, extremely anxious now, whipped his head around to look behind him.

Alfred shot him, as did several others.

Their aim wasn't perfect - they hit Sally too. The thug had tried to guarantee that by hiding mostly behind her.

But their weapons were on stun, so it wasn't a problem that Sally git hit. And the goon had been hit far more often than Sally had.

Alfred, though he knew the stunned thug could not hear him, added "Even if you hadn't turned to look, and even before we actually got folks behind you to shoot you, I'd have shot you anyway - what idiot thinks that holding a hostage can possibly work in a world where stun weapons are so effective? Maybe you've been watching old dramas?"

One of Alfred's newer workers exclaimed "How can you be so crass - Sally could have been killed!"

Alfred turned and explained. "It was far more likely that she'd be killed if I didn't shoot than if I did. If I'd let him have his way, they'd have gotten in the shuttle and flown away. He'd no longer have had us threatening him and so would have been in total control of the situation on the shuttle. Never give that kind of control to someone who has already decided to murder and declared his intention to do so - he may find myriad reasons, such as silencing a witness, to think it is still a good idea. Comparatively," Alfred continued "shooting him now had little risk - his gun was pointed at Sally, yet he could not afford to shoot first - in doing so he'd have lost his hostage, his bargaining position, and, soon after that, his life. I had my gun aimed at him and it cost me nothing to fire when the moment looked right - whether he, Sally, or both, got stunned. I've seen a lot of people stunned and none of them ever managed to act, not even twitch, after they got hit. So shooting was the safest thing I could do."

The worker shut up and looked thoughtful.

Alfred was quickly distracted by folks hauling out the stunned guard - they were holding him only around the arms and dragging him awkwardly. Alfred didn't have to wonder why for long.

The guard's pants were wet and turning brown.

He had been hit so many times that he had soiled himself, and nobody wanted any contact with his mess.

Floyd came up and reported that Sally was fine and would wake up in about an hour, then pointed at the thug being dragged towards the brig and said

"Boss, all our people are saying it's not their job to clean him."

Alfred thought a moment and replied "You know, they're right - he can stay dirty a few hours until he wakes up and can clean himself. If he gets a rash, it will serve him right."

That settled that.

But there were plenty of other issues to settle - unless handled right, their citizen's arrest of the corrupt Council Security Guards could easily be made to look like armed rebellion. And Alfred had no doubt that the Council would love to make it look that way.

But there were other sources of Authority than just the Council.

So Alfred immediately called up Commander Adama, discussed the situation with him, sent him copies of all the security tapes in question, and offered that anyone who Adama wanted to send to investigate, including Warriors, but not including more Council Security, was welcome.

Warriors were on the way shortly after they finished their call.

Meanwhile Alfred was preparing a video presentation. He finished it just before the warriors arrived, but held off sending it, in case the warriors had anything to add.

The half-dozen Warriors under Captain Apollo interviewed Alfred and his assistants first, then everybody else concerned in any way with the matter. They'd watched the full video footage on the flight over from Galactica.

While they were at it, Sally woke up from her stun.

"Ow. Unc did you shoot me?"

"Yes - we shot the thug and someone hit you too, but stun isn't supposed to hurt?"

"It's not the stun that hurt - I bumped my head when I hit the ground. That's what hurts."

"Yah, sorry about that. Does it hurt worse than being dead?"

"Point taken, but if you'd let him capture me, they have sent Apollo to rescue me. They *Always* send Apollo. He's cute!"

Apollo, entering the room at that moment, said "Thanks miss, but aren't you a little young to be worrying about that? Anyway, I have some questions to ask you about the incident."

Sally blushed, but answered the questions.

The investigation was soon over, after which Alfred asked the investigating warriors each to tape a statement to add to his video presentation. Apollo and 3 others agreed. Their statements just summarized their findings, but that was all Alfred needed.

He sent the video presentation out to all the active game units immediately, figuring that the faster the truth got out, the more resistant he would be to any shenanigans from the Council.

Then he sent something similar to the Council, making his case that the security thugs be tried immediately and found guilty.

His plea ended with "This is a major issue - you can side with obvious facts and justice, or you can stupidly try to cling to the idea that your own power makes you above the law."

He didn't expect much, and the Council did not disappoint. Rather they exceeded his expectations and quickly declared the thugs not guilty, with the explanation that whatever they did while on Council business was inherently authorized by the Council. The vote was the usual 10 to 2.

Alfred sent a plea to reconsider, ending

"The 2 previous Councils of 12, with the exception of Adama, wiped themselves out by stupidly clinging to an idea that was demonstrably false - that there could be peace with the Cylons. This stupidity was so profound it was deadly, to them and many others. Most of humanity, in fact. Now I see you similarly clinging to a stupid idea despite the facts, and I wonder just how many could end up dead as a result of your stupidity. If there are any, I hope it includes yourselves."

The Council ignored that too, and sent 3 shuttles full of Council security to LowBoy to 'rescue the Council Security Hostages that Councilman Pike is illegally holding". Clearly that was just a thin fiction designed to cover up an attempt to quash their opposition.

But Alfred's soldiers were back from camouflage practice. 300 of them, with drawn weapons, met the Council shuttles and enforced Alfred's search and quarantine rules. A dozen of the Council Security goons had to be stunned, but the rules got enforced.

They had not even reached their cells yet before Alfred had sent another broadcast to all the active game units, and well as all other communications devices in the fleet.

In his broadcast he explained the situation, listing all the laws the security goons had broken, and emphasizing that 10 members of the Council had voted, in defiance of the law, to dismiss all charges against the thugs. That the Council's vote itself was illegal - breaking the Charter of Humanity - their foundational law - and also flaunting the very concept of the rule of law, raising all kinds of issues, was also discussed in the message. Alfred then urged the members of the fleet to immediately hold a recall vote and vote "No Confidence" in the 10 Council members.

He plead with the people to realize that this kind of behavior cannot be allowed to stand - that if they did not stand up and stop it, the Council would already be 9/10'ths of the way to being unaccountable dictators, and their Council Security troops would be unaccountable bullies, able to perpetrate any abuse without the people having any recourse.

In fact there were already many stories of Council Security abusing their powers.

Apparently Alfred's message, the video, and the Council vote evidence were enough, especially with the other abuse stories added in.

Enough people called for a Recall vote. That vote was held immediately, and the Recall passed. The 10 Council members were caught offguard - not believing that anything could challenge their power. Not, that is, until Adama's Warriors marched into the Council chamber and arrested them.

Their trial was similarly quick. They were found guilty and moved to the prison barge, along with as many of their goons as were found guilty in their own trials.

It all happened before the goons in Alfred's Quarantine ran out their 7 days quarantine time. But when they got released from quarantine, the few who did not then go straight to their own trials knew better than to try anything - they had lost their Council support.

In the ensuing elections for finding a replacement Council, Alfred campaigned hard for any candidates with common sense and real work experience. His argument was that folks who live in the world of ideas, like politicians and academics, don't have much feedback from the real world on whether their ideas are practical or completely unworkable, so can easily lose sight of the basic truths of reality. Consequently, they often lack common sense.

But habits die hard. Folks were used to thinking that only career politicians and famous people were electable. That is who they voted for, and that is who comprised the new Council.

With the Prison barge overfull, Alfred introduced a motion to the Council, suggesting that anyone with a life sentence be marooned on a habitable world instead of permanently incarcerated.

He argued that, while they'd be taking their chances that the Cylons would not find them, if their technology level and numbers were low, then Cylon scans were likely to miss them. So, while they'd be at some risk, everyone in the fleet was at risk anyway, and there was certainly no justification for giving them any special privileges, like the comparatively spacious accommodations in the prison barge.

He further plead that there was no point feeding & housing these unproductive blights on society when food and housing space are in short supply.

He ended "Let them take their chances on farming - We're all taking our chances anyway."

The Council passed the resolution, but, from listening to the debate, Alfred feared that perhaps their reasons for doing so were mainly to consolidate their power by making sure the previous Council was well and truly gone.

The former Council, and many other prisoners, were dropped on a likely world the same day. They had seeds, simple unpowered hand tools like shovels and hoes, some food, and tents. That was it.

º°`°º¤ø¤º°`°º¤ø¤º°`

-Omake-

Or in other words, 'extra', like an outtake or bonus scene.

Kon-Seel Momet, the 14th of that name in a long line stretching back over 200 yahrens, finished the ancient ritual rock carving, laid down his knife, and began the associated prayer

"Oh mighty microchip, which is at the command of your maker - send me what I want or I will scrap you! This time I demand Rain."

As usual, it did nothing.

Not wanting to waste the hours it had taken to carve by smashing the rock tablet, as he'd threatened, he instead took out his frustration by following another ancient ritual - pummeling to death a long, narrow, toothy fish he'd brought with him for the purpose. Legend said that that kind of fish was the source of all their problems.

Feeling better, he went back to his latest project - weaving cones. He tried to make his latest cone very silly indeed - weaving in various mismatched colorful shells, drawing alternating smiley and frowny faces on it, and adding long curly tassels in clashing colors.

Another ancient legend said that a Silly Cone would make a woman more attractive, and Momet's wife needed all the help she could get.

He could hardly wait to try it.

Whistling as he went, he started back down the mountain towards his simple farming village.

He left behind his carving. This time he'd carved a scary and monstrous face, since nobody knew what a 'microchip' was supposed to look like - only that it was etched into silicon, which meant rocks.


	12. Chapter 12

Chapter 12

While the voting and trials had been going on other things continued more or less as usual in the ragtag fleet.

That meant that Alfred's folks got a lot of production done.

It also meant that they got attacked by Cylons. And the attacks seemed to be happening with increasing frequency and ever larger numbers of Cylons.

The latest attack had been with a full "wall" of Cylon Raiders. That's 300 - the full load carried by a Base Star.

The Base Star that must have launched them hung back, out of sensor range, as they usually liked to do.

The Cylons had arrived from the side of the fleet, instead of the rear as had been most common.

Two squadrons, or 150 fighters total, went after the Galactica. One squadron of 75 went after the cargo sphere, which was almost complete. And the last 75 Cylons split up and attacked miscellaneous ships in the fleet.

There had been a little warning, so Galactica's Vipers engaged the Cylons almost as soon as the Cylons arrived. They did an effective job distracting and defeating the Cylons near them. Vipers with skilled pilots could take on Cylons at 3 to 1 odds and defeat them handily - even new-ish Viper pilots could take Cylons 2-1. But such dogfights took time.

And the way all the ships had deployed, a solid wall of Cylons were between the Vipers and the rear of the fleet, where the cargo sphere was. The Vipers couldn't just ignore the intervening Cylons and fly to the rear - they'd take far greater losses than normal if they tried. So, while most of the fleet was fairly well protected by Vipers, the cargo sphere was not.

But, with the warning they'd had, Alfred's forces had gotten ready.

85 armed shuttles were in flight, ready to snipe at the Cylons when they got a chance.

The cargo sphere had 60 SnowRams on its surface ready to shoot at Cylons, and these were augmented with 450 soldiers, 45 tripod laser heavy-weapons systems, and 40 Bantam vehicles with their pintle-mounted lasers.

And there was one ancient-style wooden catapult.

It was a surprise to Alfred when the Borellian No-Men brought it out, loaded in a big rock, and fired it at the incoming wall of Cylons.

He was far more surprised when the rock exploded violently, just over a thousand metrons away from any human ship and with a blast radius extending almost to those same ships.

Apparently the Cylons were too. They had not bothered shooting at the simple rock, since rocks were no threat.

Clearly though, this had not been a simple rock, but a disguised mine. It took out 31 Cylon fighters.

The various lasers, both on the cargo sphere and on all the nearby ships, took out the rest.

Despite Alfred's requests to the contrary, the Vipers did not go seek out the Cylon Base Star and attack it. They were ordered to return instead, as part of a general policy of taking no risks that could be avoided.

The Cylons, with all the dodging they'd had to do to try to survive a bit longer, had not managed to fit in much strafing. So only 11 ships were hit, and only once or twice each. The cargo sphere only took a single hit - it was durable and simple to repair, but still they'd have a fair amount of repairing to do on the other 10 ships.

The catapult turned out to be a manifestation of the Borellian sense of humor - a large tree had died on the forest levels of the cargo sphere, and they'd quickly turned it into a catapult because they thought that was funny. Later someone had suggested disguising a mine as a rock and actually using the catapult, which they did.

They wouldn't do it again though, for two reasons.

First the catapult's tension had been cranked up so high that it had destroyed itself when it threw the mine.

And second, because Alfred worked with them to provide something better.

His design team had been talking about it anyway, and now seemed like a good time to build what they were calling an "Artillery Crawler".

They started with the design for a LandRam - actually the tracked SnowRam variant, and stripped off everything nonessential. This left them with frame, engine, transmission, and tracks.

To that they added a platform with 2 high-powered laser turrets on it, and plenty of energizers to run them. These turrets had augmented slewing mechanisms, so they could turn and aim much faster. But more importantly, they had a much higher rate of fire than regular laser turrets, partly due to having plenty of energy, and partly due to highly enhanced cooling mechanisms.

They also had hemispherical 'gun shields' to protect them from hits. While these were very lightweight, they would still stop the first laser hit on each gun. They were made of very thin metal and designed not to interfere with firing arcs at all, by including a section with separate plates like a lobstertail which could retract when needed. Gun shields like this were being looked at for addition to other kinds of guns as well.

Then they added an automatic snap-in-place steam projector and crane for loading and launching mines, plus strong electromagnets for holding it in place against the recoil of such mine launches.

While they were at it, they also worked on enhancing the vehicle's speed a bit.

Lastly they added back some basic driving controls, and small compartments for a driver and 2 gunners, plus sets of remote controls so the vehicle could be operated from a distance with nobody actually inside the vehicle.

As soon as the design was complete, they started building the first dozen.

They'd been looking into it because Alfred's ships could not mount as many laser turrets as their size would otherwise allow. The turtle shells which offered them so much extra protection, got in the way of installing things. To install laser turrets above the shell would require piercing the shell, which would add complexity, weaken its structural integrity, and complicate repairs.

So instead they had been using LandRams, then SnowRams, as mobile turrets on their ships. Those worked, but they wanted to improve them anyway, if they could.

And the new Artillery Crawlers definitely looked like an improvement, with much higher firepower, range, and ability to hit maneuverable targets.

Hitting maneuverable targets was the weak point of laser turrets, and a large part of why they were only about 35% as effective as Vipers. It was worst when you had only one armed ship, as had been the case with the ragtag fleet before Alfred started arming more ships. With only one armed ship, the Cylons could, and did, either stay out of its effective range, or charge in as close to it as they could. Charging in close made their evasive maneuvers far more effective, since, when they were close in, they moved so much faster, relative to the turret, that the laser turrets had to slew quite a bit more to try to hit them.

But with several armed ships supporting each-other, a target that was close-in to one ship and would therefore be a hard target for it, was far enough away from the other ship to be a much easier target. The other ship still had to be careful not to hit the first ship, but that too, got better with more ships involved.

With just two ships, there were many times when the Cylon and his target ship were both in a direct line from the other ship's perspective, such that if he missed the Cylon he would hit the Cylon's target ship.

But add one more ship to the side of the others, and the Cylon will no longer be between him and a friendly, from his perspective.

It took a bit to coordinate it all, but with that coordination between multiple armed ships, laser turrets became much more effective.

Mostly.

In the final battle where the human fleet was wiped out, other errors severely impaired their defenses.

For one thing, Baltar had persuaded the Council to put politicians in charge of all the BattleStars, and to send them to the 'peace conference' ambush regardless of their state of repair.

The political appointees may have been good negotiators, or otherwise valuable if there actually had been a conference. But they didn't know military tactics very well. They tended to freeze up under pressure. They failed to hold formation and coordinate fire, so the Cylons got in close and wrecked them.

The fleet could have performed much better than it did, if only the political appointees had gotten out of the way.

And mostly the ships had not gone into that situation with serious damage. But the Galactica had, in a previous battle, had her Fire Control Director shot away, overloading and disabling 3/4 of her laser turrets. The Fire Control Director was a complex part - very hard to manufacture and replace. They'd hurried to the 'peace conference' ambush without it having been replaced yet. Many of the disabled laser turrets had been repaired, yet still operated poorly without the enhancements an FCD provided.

Hephaestus had been building a replacement fire control director for Galactica for a long time. It looked like it would be done soon.

As Alfred was getting ready for his first in-person meeting with the new Council, Floyd dropped in.

"Hey Boss, they told me you want the wooden fragments of that Borellian catapult saved - what for?"

"Hey Floyd. Yes that's true. I'd been wondering what to do with trees when they die, and tree branches when they break off or get pruned, and so on. Mostly I could only think of furniture, but we get a better product faster with other materials such as metal. So furniture didn't sound like a good use. But one of our people found me a good answer."

"What's that boss?" Floyd asked, holding Alfred's attention as Sally sneaked behind him and into his room carrying a package.

"Well you wouldn't think it, but apparently you can turn wood into clothes and other textiles."

"Really? That seems hard to believe. How do they do it?" Floyd asked, as Sally snuck back out of Alfred's room with a different package and a big smile.

"Well Floyd, the short form, since I'm in a bit of a rush to get to the Council meeting, is that you dissolve the wood in certain chemicals, then push it through a bunch of really small nozzles. What comes out of the nozzles is basically thread. You treat these threads with more chemicals to help them keep their shape and to give them more durability, then you just weave these threads like you would any other threads. The resulting cloth, called Rayon, is actually very nice - smooth and soft. We'll be using all our scrap wood to make it, since textiles of all sorts have been in very short supply, and we don't want the wood to go to waste. And since textiles are in high demand, paying workers with cloth would be another option."

While Alfred had been talking, Sally had gone into her room and exited from her other door, taking the second package with her and giving Floyd the thumbs-up as she left.

"Funny you should mention textiles - we noticed your pants are, well, completely worn out. They're the same pants you were wearing when we fled the Colonies, aren't they?"

"Yes they are. I should probably replace them, but I haven't heard of any good options. Some folks made new clothes out of things like draperies and rugs, but those have all been used up, from what I hear. It's been a low priority anyway, as long as my underwear holds out."

"OK. Well, good luck at Council meeting" Floyd said, as he left.

Alfred wasn't sure, but it seemed that Floyd had hurried the last few steps out, while trying to seem not to hurry.

He wondered about that as he went back to his room to finish getting ready.

But once he entered, he stopped wondering.

Wrapped up nicely in a package waiting for him on his bed, was a new pair of pants. After looking at the new pants, Alfred looked for his old pair of pants, but they were gone.

He shrugged philosophically, mumbled "but I *liked* those pants." and put on the new pair.

It would be interesting to see people's reactions to them.

On the one hand, they were skillfully made, and the colors and patterns were actually appealing ... if you could get past the fact that they were made of rabbit fur, in tastefully matched patterns. They turned out to be very comfortable, and felt like they would be durable and serve well.

But they were very very unfashionable.

He hoped this new Council would be more tolerant than the last one.

When he got there, nobody said a word, but he thought he heard some suppressed snickering.

The preliminaries and introductions were cordial.

And Alfred, now having the highest seniority except for Adama, got to present his proposals near the start of the meeting.

He wanted to start with a lecture about increasing production, very similar to the one he'd first proposed to the last Council.

But he wasn't sure how that would go, so instead he started with another proposal, and mentioned production soon after.

"Councilors, I have 3 proposals. First, from the actions of the last Council we can see once again the truth of the maxim 'power corrupts'. We need to take steps to prevent such abuses from happening again. So I propose some restrictions be put on all Council members.

All.

We need to make them accountable for all their actions - even more accountable than a private person is, because they have far more responsibility. These restrictions largely amount to expanded surveillance of Council members, to be placed in the public record for all to see, and harsh punishments for lying. Additionally, the document I've passed around specifies that public officials have no more rights than anybody else - they are not exempt from any laws. And any conviction for a crime would get any public officials removed from office and banned for life from holding public office again - we don't want criminals in leadership positions."

"Second" he continued, "I'd like to get current law changed so my ships can leave the fleet, briefly, to collect usable materials from asteroids and comets or easily accessible planets. Recently we almost lost any further production because this was not allowed."

"And third, I'd like the Council to allocate the Fleet's production resources, basically factories, to the essential needs of the fleet - that is, food, fuel, defense, and, in order to get any of those, expanding production. Our production facilities have been working on comfort - improved housing - which, while important, should be a lower priority."

"Thank you for considering these, and I'll be happy to answer any questions before we vote on them." Alfred sat down.

Discussion started off simply:

"Councilman Pike, what are you talking about with needing more food? We have enough."

"Yes, Councilman Clemith, we do. And it isn't even the starvation rations it used to be. But that's because of our efforts to expand production and it just emphasizes the need to work on production. It wasn't that long ago since we were all slowly wasting away on not enough calories per day. Now we have enough calories, though we still need better nutrition. Among other things, every single day my ships produce 480,980 pounds of edible algae. We feed a significant amount of that to fish in our fish farms, because direct consumption of algae isn't very popular, but the point is that there is a lot of food being produced now."

"The algae doesn't taste very good, you should grow wheat instead."

Alfred didn't see who had said that, but answered anyway.

"Sir, the algae is grown in the water layers of our ships, which were put there as extra defense against attacks, and as a reserve fuel source at need. Growing algae in it is just a side benefit of it's main functions. There are things that can be grown in a water layer like that - shrimp and krill - that's small crustaceans - for example, but we get the best yields from algae. Wheat will not grow there. If we had more production, then we could build ships to hold wheat farms. We need to do something like that - our nutrition still isn't what it ought to be: we're not yet getting the right mix of vitamins. And our margin is pretty thin - a couple inconvenient hits on certain ships in a Cylon raid and we'd be in trouble. Spend the production time to fix that - secure and broaden our food sources. And the other things I've mentioned, like beefing up our defenses, are just as important, if not more so."

Discussion was long.

Alfred answered their questions, but to no avail - he lost the vote on all 3.

They said that it could 'cause anarchy' if ships left the fleet and such permission, even for brief excursions, would 'imperil fleet unity'.

They said that restrictions on Council members would 'fundamentally undermine basic human rights'.

They said 'mission accomplished', as far as increasing production and improving the situation of the fleet regarding food, fuel, and defense. They pointed out the improvement in those areas that had been made, and claimed that it was enough. They said that now that that had been achieved, it was time to focus on comfort to 'alleviate the suffering of the forlorn masses' who were 'distressed and dismayed at the casual manner in which their needs are being ignored'.

Alfred pointed out that his ships could now house over 48,000 people - a significant fraction of the fleet's total population of 990,000, and that that would not have been possible without expanding production.

They said that 'the record clearly shows your new housing is substandard and dangerous', and that 'formal studies done by the previous Council make it clear that the number 1 priority must be improved housing'.

Alfred insisted that the needs for expanding production, improving defense, and fixing the fuel situation, were far from taken care of - that what had been done was only a beginning.

They politely disagreed.

At least they were polite.

And it had cost Alfred nothing to try.

Well, probably nothing.

It was clear they had been reading the old Council's notes, and that had set up a situation where Alfred's proposals may have simply alienated them.

They certainly seemed to want to 'buy votes' like the previous Council, and were only too happy to use existing excuses to do so.

Most of them wanted to buy votes by improving housing, but a small faction - 2 Councilors - thought that distributing items like furniture and appliances would be better. They were voted down too, though Alfred saw an opportunity there. His people had salvaged many small appliances, furniture, and other repairable things from Kobol, which he was having trouble finding time to refurbish and distribute. There were always higher priorities for him, so the stuff was mainly taking up space he'd rather use for other things like storing more raw materials.

So he offered to donate the lot of it - all the refurbishable Kobold goods, to be refurbished by Hephaestus and distributed to the people of the fleet.

He figured that maybe it would get the appliance faction of the Council to see him more favorably. And at least, if they were going to waste Hephaestus' time anyway, they may as well do it in a way that would free up some of Alfred's storage space.

The Council accepted this proposal, though Alfred suspected it was simply because it was a cheap way to get the people to like them and vote for their re-election when that came up.

The one promising thing to come out of the meeting was a request from the Council for him to make a pair of Liberty Ships devoted to being parks. They wanted each ship to be planted with things like the forest levels on his cargo sphere were, suggesting that it would be very good for fleet morale.

Alfred went along with it for 2 reasons.

First, he hoped going along with them on this issue would incline the Council more positively towards his proposals.

And second, there was actual value in such a thing - morale is indeed important and if it collapsed, the fleet would achieve nothing and soon die off in Cylon attacks. Alfred judged that any such event was far off, and getting further off as things improved, but felt it would not cost a lot to try to appease the Council.

Plus, with their support, he could get some folks from the Agriculture ships to come and accelerate the growth of the plants in the park ships, and he hoped to have his own folks watch and learn how. All Alfred's folks could currently accelerate the growth of was trees.

And who said that parks should be limited to pretty plants? Alfred hoped to grow pretty plants that also happened to produce food, if he could think of any.

So when Alfred got back to LowBoy, noting without comment that Sally and Floyd were also wearing rabbit fur clothes now, he asked them

"They want a couple new Liberty Ships set up as parks for morale. I said ok in hopes of better relations. What kinds of plants are pretty but also edible? Maybe we'll have more choices if we make one ship tropical and the other temperate?"

That sparked a long discussion, ending with several interesting suggestions.

So pods 19 and 20 got added to the build queue. They would be finished fairly quickly, as all they needed was the ceramic ship hull, and turtle shell, with major floors and half as many minor floors, plus a bridge, an engine, and support systems for the plants.

Then finally it was time to commission the cargo sphere. It had been delayed a bit longer while they added a block of housing - as much as a standard Liberty Ship - to the Shell 2, where the shuttle bay and raw materials storage were. They'd discovered that they needed housing for pilots and the soldiers who often protected the sphere.

But even that was finally done.

In a way, it had helped them choose a name for the ship.

Soldiers, with their vehicles and heavy weapons, were constantly going to the outside surface of the cargo sphere in order to protect it from Cylon attacks.

That was because the Cylons were, for some reason, very focused on attacking the sphere. Maybe because it was a bigger ship than anything nearby - Galactica and a couple other ships were bigger, but they hung out at the front of the fleet, leaving the sphere as by far the biggest ship in the back.

Whatever the reason, the Cylons targeted it a lot, and that had decided its name.

While some of its residents and visitors had pushed to call it "Happy Fun Ball" due to its park and aquarium levels and the recreations that happened there, they had been far outvoted by those who wanted to call it Mousetrap or BattleSphere due to its strong attraction for the Cylons who frequently attacked it and were destroyed in doing so.

So it was christened the BattleSphere Mousetrap.

Shortly thereafter, Alfred got a call from Ron that he'd been hoping for

"Hey Alfred, do you still have room for extra Vipers?"

"Absolutely.", Alfred responded "Did it go as we speculated?"

"Yup" Ron replied "When Galactica accepted the last delivery of new Vipers, they said they were full now & they'd let us know when they needed more."

"So they didn't tell you to stop producing them?"

"No. I think they assumed that we would, but they didn't say so. So, as you and I discussed, we'll keep cranking them out as fast as we can, as long as any ship in the fleet can still accommodate any." Ron chuckled "It'll be nice to have more Vipers than Galactica alone can carry - she's great but can't be everywhere."

"True. This is excellent. I have storage for quite a few, and we've already upgraded 12 ships with new pre-Marron drives, laser turrets, and Dockers. Those are the things that let them dock half a dozen Vipers and a shuttle, at an airlock which previously could only dock one shuttle or Viper."

"Nice."

"Thanks. Whenever you have a batch of fighters ready for me to 'store', just let me know."

"I should have a small batch ready tomorrow." Ron replied.

"Great. I have a bunch of cadets ready and eager to fly them from your ship to mine. Officially they are just 'ferry pilots' - for ferrying new Vipers between ships like this. But in fact they're almost ready for combat, most of them. Flights like this - in real Vipers, will help. I can't keep up with demand for Training Vipers for them to practice in. Even Galactica's new cadets are using Training Vipers, though they don't have room to store them on Galactica. That's fine, I have room."

"Adama is a reasonable man, and any reasonable man can see the value of extra training flights."

"Good point, and yes he is, even when he is keeping his head down trying to avoid antagonizing the Council."

Ron just laughed.

They worked out the delivery details, then hung up.


	13. Chapter 13

Chapter 13

Two days later, it was time to commission the Fleet Repair Dock. There was no discussion about it's name - everybody agreed it's name was self-evidently Fred.

The final step had been to emplace the laser turrets - the FRD was based around 12 Liberty Ships and each of those would normally get 6 laser turrets. But the way the thing was built, they would not have been able to fire if emplaced normally. So instead they placed them at the ends of the 'soda can': half, or 36, encircling the front, and 36 more around the rear of the FRD's cylinder.

The big machines from the shipyard at Kobol, already refurbished while in storage, had been emplaced in Fred's Outer Work Area. They started making parts, which would be assembled as new ships in the Inner Work Area.

The Inner Work Area could contain about 20 times the volume of a Liberty Ship, though less than that could actually be constructed at once, since each ship took up about twice it's own volume while it was being assembled.

Alfred and others had spent a long time looking over designs, trying to choose what ships to build, and had settled on 3 types. All were Colonial warship designs, which had later been modified by the Borellian No-Men for their own use.

The Colonials, ever focused on peace, had a ship design philosophy that could be summarized as "How many weapons does it need for defending itself?"

The Borellians, ever focused on strength, including having as strong a fleet as they could, had a ship design philosophy that could be summarized as "How many weapons can we cram onto it if we try really hard?"

The Borellian approach seemed better adapted to the circumstances the fleet faced now.

Deciding had been difficult, with reasons for and against every possibility. Some of those were good reasons & some were not.

Alfred remembered one exchange on the subject.

Someone had protested "But the government of the 12 Colonies evaluated that design and rejected it!"

And Alfred had responded "'The Government' doesn't really evaluate anything - they just assign some people to look into it. Usually that's a committee. Large committees tend to go with the consensus, which means they go with what everybody believes that everybody else thinks. No new ideas come out of that - such an approach drowns out anything new or different. So real experts, and especially any actual geniuses, with their new ideas, effectively get shouted down. Small committees don't tend to include experts - their slots fill up first with bureaucrats & administrators. So don't think that because "The Government" decides something, that it is necessarily the best decision. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Besides, the 12 Colonies faced very different circumstances than we face. So even if it was a poor fit for their military, it looks like a good fit for ours."

That discussion had been about a type of ship called a "Firebase". Firebases, also known as Gunboats, were constructed on the same 100 metron long, 30 metron wide hull as Frigates. This was a point in their favor, since standardization made construction go faster and they were planning to build regular Frigates as well.

The major point of contention had been their armament, which was primarily Pulsars.

A regular Frigate, Borellian style, mounted a line of 5 laser turrets down it's spine, with another line of 5 down the belly, and also down each edge, for 20 total. It also carried 6 Vipers.

Tenacity was different. In its conversion to being a Hospital Ship, it had lost 5 of those turrets and all of its Vipers. But that wouldn't be true much longer - the first thing the FRD was doing, by Tenacity's request, was converting Tenacity back into a full Frigate while transferring her hospital functions, equipment, etc to the FRD itself. It made sense - casualties took place mainly as ships got damaged, so in the event a ship got damaged, taking it to the FRD would be the fastest way to get both it, and its people, taken care of.

And Tenacity would, after the conversion, be more able to fight, which is what they wanted to do anyway. When the new Frigates were done, they wanted to be part of a 3-Frigate team and use the tactics for such teams that the Borellians had been working on and optimizing for a long time.

But while full Frigates were well armed, and almost as fast as Vipers, the Firebases would be neither. Not well-armed by conventional standards anyway. They kept only 4 laser turrets and no Vipers, since all their capacity went to mounting 6 Pulsars and the energy generating and capacitance systems necessary to run those Pulsars.

The Pulsar was a weapon that both the Colonials and Cylons had tried out 3 centuries ago, and given up on.

In its favor, it had an absolutely absurd maximum range. It could shoot many times further than the best sensors could see. And it hit about 10 times as hard as the laser mounted on a Viper or laser turret.

On the downside, it was space inefficient, energy inefficient, used a vast amount of energy with each shot, and had a maximum amount of energy it could use per shot which they'd never managed to increase, so it couldn't really be upgraded. So Pulsars were overkill for fighters, doing more than 10 times as much damage as it took to vaporize them, and at the same time did insufficient damage to really bother Base Stars. And that amount of damage could not be tuned up or down - at least they'd never found a way.

Worse yet, when all was said and done, a ship armed with Pulsars could get in about 4 shots at regular fire rates before it's energy storage systems ran dry. After that, its rate of fire was quite slow - less than one shot for every 30 that a laser turret got, mainly because the power generation systems took forever to build up sufficient charge.

A Pulsar-armed ship could get in a couple surprise hits if it had a spotter, but after the first hits the enemy fighters would start dodging, making any further hits much harder to get, and compounding the problem of having very few shots ready before being reduced to a very low fire rate.

And while enemy fighters could dodge, the other likely target - enemy Base Stars - were too tough for a few Pulsars to bother.

Base Stars could soak up a vast amount of damage before being significantly impaired, just as BattleStars could. That varied a lot depending on what was hit, and the rate at which the hits were delivered, but on average it took about 3000 hits from Vipers to take down a Base Star, and a very similar amount for Cylon Raiders to take down a BattleStar.

That sounds like a lot until you recall that a full wall of 300 Cylon Raiders would only have to pull the trigger 5 times each for their twin lasers to add up enough hits. And given their fire rate, that didn't take long at all.

Of course, nobody sat still to be shot at like that - they launched their own fighters to interfere with the enemy's plans, shoot them down, spoil their aim, and otherwise make their hits arrive much slower so that the ships' form-fitting forcefields did a better job attenuating each shot. If the hits arrived at a slow enough rate, the forcefields, which ran along the whole surface of each ship like a second skin or a clear paint job, could recharge in time and do really well at reducing the damage.

But for both offense and defense, massed fighters were crucial.

The Cylons and Colonials had both seen that, and had given up on Pulsars in favor of the much higher sustained damage output that lasers could deliver.

Pulsars just didn't fit very well into anybody's battle plans.

So nobody bothered with them.

Except Alfred.

He saw uses for them in their current situation.

Normally, fleets needed mobility.

But the ragtag fleet was slow enough to be effectively immobile - at least compared to military ships like the Cylons were sending.

So what the ragtag fleet needed was something more like a 'static defense', and Pulsars covered that need pretty well.

The Cylons had, for a long time, attacked whenever one of their patrols found the human fleet. Sure, a scout patrol of 3, or a patrol of 12, had no hope of surviving an attack on the ragtag fleet, but they attacked anyway in hopes of whittling down the fleet - a few hits here, a few hits there & pretty soon damaged ships have to be scrapped and cannibalized in order to repair other damaged ships.

And that was how it was working before Alfred had gotten his production operations going - 6 ships had already been scrapped by that point.

And now, even though Alfred could repair ships faster than such attacks were damaging them, the Cylons continued to attack in that manner - they'd never been quick on the uptake.

So such attacks continued to damage ships, and, worse, cause human casualties, because Vipers took a little time - not much but a little - to respond, since the pilots had to get to their ships and launch.

But with ship-mounted Pulsars, they could respond with no notice - the ships were always manned, the guns were always ready. When a Cylon patrol was spotted, all they had to do was rotate the turrets and fire. And they'd be likely to hit because the Firebases mounted sensors much better than Cylon fighters mounted, so they'd know the Cylons were there before the Cylons knew the humans were there - they didn't dodge before they knew they needed to.

So small Cylon raids could be eliminated before they ever got close enough to fire at the humans.

And bigger Cylon raids could be reduced to smaller Cylon raids, which were easier to deal with with Vipers and laser turrets.

Plus, human scout patrols frequently got ambushed by Cylon patrols and had to fight it out. To improve the Vipers' chances in such fights, larger patrols were sent out. But that fatigued more pilots and burned more fuel.

A different solution would be to support the Vipers with Pulsar fire from the Firebases. Pulsars had plenty of range - they could hit anything the Vipers could fly to, or even, just barely, anything within maximum scanner distance of a Viper that had flown to its maximum range.

Four Vipers on a scout patrol could, and routinely did, beat a dozen Cylons in a fair fight. But they'd take a lot fewer losses if that dozen Cylons got taken out by Pulsar fire before closing within laser range of any Vipers.

And lastly, if any Cylon Base Stars came in scanning range, the pulsars would be able to hit it and give it a few dents. They couldn't kill it - not by a long shot - before they ran out of ready shots or the Cylons ran. But making it run was worthwhile, and was a near certainty, since the Cylons were very reluctant to risk losing any Base Stars - if one took damage, it would run.

And while it was very easy to hit things with lasers - just point and shoot & you'll hit, unless the target is fast, maneuverable, and actively dodging, it was, in some ways, even easier to hit with Pulsars, since their shots go much faster than light most of the time.

Pulsars fired a pulse of superhot plasma at a significant fraction of the speed of light, and what's more, the pulse was contained in a small bubble of hyperspace.

Spacegoing ships used that same principle to travel - each generated a small invisible envelope around itself in which the rules of hyperspace applied instead of the rules of normal space. Basically that meant they cruised along at many thousands of times the speed of light, while appearing, in all ways, to be in normal space. Those bubbles needed energy to maintain them, and higher speeds took more, which limited the maximum speed you could choose. And pre-Marron drives took more energy to maintain the bubble than Marron drives took.

But more limiting to the maximum speed was the fact that traveling that way generates stresses, some of which are transmitted to the ship inside the bubble. The ships of the ragtag fleet were generally old and decrepit, which meant they couldn't risk too much stress. So they moved slow.

But a blob, or pulse, of plasma was not in the least affected by any amount of stress. So Pulsar pulses could have very very high Hyperspace speeds without any problem.

They could hit targets many light yahrens away, with a shot flight time of just seconds. Seconds are plenty of time in which to dodge, once you know you need to. But until you knew there was something out there capable of shooting at you, you didn't bother dodging.

Pulsar shots arrived with effectively no warning, so their first shots had almost a 100% hit rate.

Further, what was a downside of the hyperspace bubble for ships, was actually a bonus to Pulsar pulses - when a Hyperspace bubble gets close enough to another Hyperspace bubble that wasn't attuned to it, or close enough to a certain amount of matter, the bubble pops. There is no noticeable transition when the bubble pops - the ship in question is suddenly in real space, going substantially less than the speed of light, but they feel no lurch or anything similar.

So when a group of Cylon fighters gets close enough to a ship of the ragtag fleet, the bubbles pop for the Cylons, and for that ship, and every ship near it, and every ship near those - in effect, all the ships in the area - the whole ragtag fleet. They then fight it out in normal space. The bubbles can be recalculated and re-formed so ships can escape, but it takes time and generally the fight is over by then.

When the fleet wants to get going again, they have to attune all their hyperspace bubbles to each-other so they can travel together in formation.

So the bubble-popping phenomenon is inconvenient for the fleet. But for a pulsar it is perfect - the pulse zips along in hyperspace, covering many light yahrens in a few seconds, but pops out again when it gets very close to its target, then hits it at a significant fraction of the speed of light.

And while a mass of plasma doesn't weigh a whole lot, any weight going that fast causes massive impact damage, not to mention the damage from the inconceivably hot temperatures of the plasma.

So they were going to build some Firebases.

Given their super-long range, the ships did not really need speed - they could fire at any target without moving from their spot in the fleet, so they were building them with pre-Marron drives, to save fuel.

Regular Frigates needed speed to be effective, so they were getting Marron drives.

With the capacity the FRD has, they could build 5 Firebases, 5 Frigates, and 3 Destroyer-Escorts, all at once. And that's what they were working on building.

Actually they technically had room to build 2 more DE (Destroyer Escorts) at the same time, but in their first production run they were still figuring things out, so were not as efficient at using the space as they would be later.

Destroyer Escorts looked almost like miniature BattleStars.

Very miniature - at 200 metrons long, they were less than a seventh as long as an actual BattleStar.

They were twice the dimensions of Frigates and had similar layouts and purpose. With the Borellian setup for laser turrets - basically one spaced every 30 metrons front to back and 15 metrons side to side, plus another one at the endpoint of every line, each Destroyer Escort was covered by a grid of laser turrets. The lines of laser turrets were 8 turrets long from the front of the ship to the back. The ship had 5 such lines on its back and belly, and 2 along each edge left and right. Fourteen lines of 8 turrets each added up to 112 laser turrets - a considerable amount of firepower, though only about a quarter of the laser turrets a BattleStar carried.

Additionally each carried 12 Vipers.

And lastly each was designed to carry a heavy anti-ship laser like a BattleStar carried.

BattleStars also carried several heavy anti-ship missiles, but there was no room for such on Destroyer Escorts.

In practice, the heavy anti-ship laser had never worked out for the Destroyer Escorts - no Destroyer Escort that either the Colonials or the Borellians had ever built, had ever gotten close enough to fire its heavy anti-ship laser and survived the experience. They just couldn't take the damage that BattleStars could take.

So the Colonials had stopped building Destroyer Escorts.

The Borellians had built some with Pulsars instead - two Pulsars and its energy systems, swapped in in place of the heavy anti-ship laser. That hadn't been enough Pulsars to achieve anything much, so they stopped building them too.

But the Borellian design looked good to Alfred and his designers. The Galactica could not be everywhere at once, and ships such as these could cover parts of the fleet that Galactica was not near. Plus, their Pulsars could chip away at any Cylons spotted at any distance.

And lastly, there were times when Galactica might want to leave the fleet briefly. In the past, she did not actually leave, because that would leave the fleet defenseless. But with 3 Destroyer Escorts, and all the other weapons and fighters, the fleet should be able to take care of itself at need, at least briefly.

What kind of drives to give it, was a tough decision. If they gave it Marron drives as designed, it would be fast enough to accompany the Frigates and Galactica if those should go on brief excursions or raids. But it would also burn precious tylium.

In the end they decided to give it pre-Marron drives, both as a fuel-saving measure, and to reduce any temptation to detach them from the fleet, even briefly. Raids and mobility are important to sound military doctrine, but any such raids would need to start small, of necessity. And having a few military ships able to continue operations even if they ran out of tylium was important too.

All the new hulls would use up most of the material from the Pyramid ship they'd salvaged on Kobol, but that was a good thing - not only was it the purpose for which they had salvaged it in the first place, but it would also free up a lot of storage space which they could fill with other things.

The new ships looked like good designs that would match the fleet's needs well. But it was still amazing how often someone would ask variations of the question "Why don't we just make more BattleStars?" As far as it went, it was a good question - BattleStars were a proven design and amazingly durable, with hulls 4 to 5 metrons thick of the best alloys, skintight forcefields, and multiply redundant systems.

But one only had to take a look at the comparative sizes of the FRD and the Galactica to realize there was no way to do it - a BattleStar was so much bigger than the space in which they could build things that it was just impossible.

Further, BattleStars were command ships, with facilities for coordinating and administering fleets, plus things like auditoriums and accommodations for Council meetings.

Eventually, with any luck, they'd have the ability to build more command ships, and have the need for them, but not yet.

For now, at least, they had to start small.

As military ship designs, the new ships would all be able to get form-fitting forcefields to make them more survivable. Such forcefields ran along all surfaces of the ship like a second skin or a clear paint job, and reduced the damage from each hit the ship took. At full strength, they reduced damage quite well, but that drained some of their energy, so following hits didn't get as much reduction, unless there was enough delay, between hits, to recharge the shields fully.

The ability to make those forcefields was just coming online now.

Alfred was a little jealous that the military ships could get such forcefields but his Liberty Ships, BattleSphere, and FRD could not. Military ships had been designed for such forcefields and his ships had not, mainly because he'd needed something in place as soon as possible. So he'd followed the tried and true maxim "a good solution, right now, is much better than a great solution later".

The next few days were suspiciously calm - with no Cylon attacks.

Since those had steadily been increasing, the pause was suspicious and probably meant something. Alfred voiced his concerns to Adama, then left it in his hands & went back to building, including 2 new Liberty Ships they'd just started.

When it came, the next Cylon attack was quite large. Evidently they'd been massing their forces and knew where to find the human fleet.

Luckily for the human fleet, a scout patrol detected the Cylons coming, in time for all Vipers to launch.

600 Cylon Raiders - 2 full "walls" as they called them, or the entire complement of 2 Base Stars, swooped in on the ragtag fleet from 2 directions: half attacked from the front & half from the rear.

Their coordination was perfect - the Cylons, for all their faults, excelled at coordinating with each other. So all 600 arrived at the same time.

The Galactica and all 160 of her Vipers met the 300 Cylons that attacked the front of the fleet. Anything less than all of her fighters might have risked the Galactica, which was always a primary target for the Cylons.

The 300 Cylons attacking the back of the fleet were met by whatever could be thrown together.

This was an ever-growing list and included LowBoy with 14 laser turrets, Fred the FRD with 72 laser turrets, 4 Liberty Ships and 2 Park ships (Liberty Ships set up as parks) with 6 laser turrets each, and Tenacity with 20 laser turrets.

Additionally, Hephaestus had 6 laser turrets, Haulers 1, 2, 3, 4 had 8 each, and Celestra had 8 LandRams roaming across her surface and acting as laser turrets.

And 14 more ships of the fleet had been refitted with pre-Marron drives, dockers, and an average of 6 laser turrets each.

That was a total of 264 laser turrets between them.

The BattleSphere Mousetrap had no laser turrets. But it did have quite a bit of mobile artillery, including 65 SnowRams, 24 Artillery Crawlers, 550 soldiers - 11 platoons, almost 3 companies - with backpack-powered laser rifles, 55 tripod lasers, and 50 bantams with their laser turrets.

Counting the 12 SnowRams roaming the surface of each Liberty Ship, that came to 225 guns on surface vehicles, not counting the soldiers' laser rifles.

On top of all that, there were 95 shuttles, each armed with one laser turret.

So 584 heavy weapons and 550 laser rifles all reached out to touch the 300 Cylons, who were obliged to do quite a bit of dodging to stay alive.

The artillery crawlers also launched mines at the incoming Cylons, but, disappointingly, they all got shot down, apparently with ease.

Now this was a respectable amount of firepower, especially with them firing according to the cooperative and coordinated fire control scheme Adama had come up with.

But the more you have, the faster the enemy go down & the less damage you take, so they also launched their new Vipers.

Tenacity had, and launched, 6 Vipers, and 4 Liberty Ships each had, and launched, 10 Vipers, for 46 total.

Technically they had just been storing these spare Vipers for Galactica to call upon at need. And officially their pilots were not qualified to fly Vipers in combat, but only to ferry them between ships of the fleet.

But Alfred's "ferry pilots' had been training long and hard, both in simulations and in Training Vipers, in addition to their few 'ferry' flights in real Vipers.

Galactica's Warrior caste had not accepted that anybody but themselves, or their official cadets, could do well in a Viper in combat.

They found out otherwise.

When the Galactica's warriors, in their Vipers, cleared out the Cylons in the front of the fleet, they sped to the rear to take on the Cylons there.

But when they arrived, they found Alfred's 'ferry pilots' chasing down the last few Cylons, and displaying respectable skills while they were at it.

It was probably the only way Alfred's Viper pilots could have been accepted as the real thing.

Alfred's training program for Viper Pilots got official recognition and OK - Adama was a reasonable man & was not the kind to argue with proven results.

The time was not very far in the past, when such an attack would have been devastating, but since they had been building up, they weathered it ok.

As it was, they still took a lot of damage before the last few Cylons fled.

Many ships would need repair, and the Turtle shells on 3 of the Liberty Ships would need to be completely replaced. But they were designed for that, so that'd be the easiest repair they faced.

The damage to the Liberty Ships was partly due to a new tactic the Borellians had developed. They thought about war a lot & so tended to come up with new things.

They had had the LandRams, SnowRams, and Artillery Crawlers firing in what they called "Hull down" position.

That position is where they keep something like a hill, though in this case the curve of the ship's hull, between themselves and the enemy. If you think of the curve of the ship's hull as a ridge line, only the SnowRam's laser poked above that 'ridge' and fired at the Cylons. That worked because the SnowRams and other vehicles could depress the angle of their guns significantly.

So when the Cylons fired back at the SnowRams, they tended to either hit the hull of the Liberty Ship, or miss entirely.

And while LandRams or SnowRams could take a hit or two and survive, the hull of a Liberty Ship, or rather the Turtle shell, which was effectively its outer hull, could take more, even after having its protective layer of snow burned off by incoming hits.

Alfred called Adama, and brought up the likelihood that the the Cylons had figured out their course.

Previous to Kobol, the ragtag fleet had wandered around, checking out every old outpost & every habitable planet for clues to where Earth could be. Consequently, the Cylons had had to scatter to search more area for them. And when the ragtag fleet had encountered Cylons, it was just one Base Star's worth, or one planetary base worth, of fighters.

But since Kobol and finding the location of Earth, the ragtag fleet had made a beeline for Earth. Now their course was predictable and the Cylons could find them easily, and concentrate their forces to destroy them.

They discussed it, but the only suggestion Alfred could think of was to randomize their course again, taking a number of unpredictable zigzags while still ending up at Earth. Adama had pointed out that that wasn't likely to work, given it'd just be variations on the base course that the Cylons already knew, and that he wasn't willing to delay the arrival at Earth by zigzagging anyway.

They both promised to think about it more and talk again later.

He had just hung up when Sally hurried in with news.

"Unc, We almost lost Apollo!"

"Huh? Do you mean in the attack - did he get shot?"

"No Unc, he missed the attack entirely - he was off on a scouting patrol and ran out of fuel. He had to land on a planet named Equalus. They have very low tech so couldn't help him get more fuel. Their tech is so low that they were even being bullied by a damaged Cylon that had previously crashed there and thought a local thug was its leader. Their guns were just pneumatic projectile guns they called Pneumos & the Cylon's armor was immune to hits from those. But Apollo used his laser to shoot the Cylon, who they didn't even know was a Cylon - they called him 'Red-Eye' That gained their trust. They showed him a crash site where he could scavenge some fuel. Even still, he barely got back. Isn't that dramatic?"

"Yes, and disturbing. We should not be losing pilots because something comes up and makes it so they haven't the fuel to return. This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened. That's part of why I'm so eager to get the Frigates finished - in such an event we could send them back to recover lost pilots and such. They don't have the fuel limits that fighters do, so could effectively go any distance, and could defend themselves if they run into small Cylon patrols, or run from big Cylon patrols."

Alfred sighed "But more important is this - Equalus is a human planet and near enough to our course for us to find it. That means the Cylons will find it too, since they routinely search the whole area we're in. And you know what Cylons do to human planets."

"Kill them?" Sally gulped.

"Yes, unfortunately. I have to contact the Council asap and see if I can get them to turn around and help, or at least evacuate those people, if at all possible. It would be wrong to just leave them to die."

Alfred got an emergency Council meeting arranged for that same day.

By the time of the meeting, Alfred had done his homework.

He started in with a rush "Councilors, the people of planet Equalus need our help. If we can find them, then the Cylons can find them, and when they do all the inhabitants there will die. That's just over 30,000 inhabitants, according to Captain Apollo's scan data. We haven't yet got the ability to build them sufficient defenses, and they couldn't maintain them if we did. Luckily we don't have to - we have room in the fleet to cram in that many extra people. I've figured out preliminaries for it all & you have that in your handouts. But we need to turn the fleet around right now - the Cylons are shadowing us with 2 Base Stars, but their recent attack has emptied those of fighters. So we have a narrow time window when we can do this evacuation without worry about being attacked during it. Vote yes and lets go."

He should have remembered that career politicians never just vote yes and go. Politics doesn't move fast & so they just aren't used to taking rapid decisive action.

They discussed it for hours.

It was frustrating, to say the least.

In summary, their arguments amounted to this:

'There is no guarantee that they Cylons will find them, nor any guarantee that they'd bother them if they did, plus it's too dangerous to risk going back for them, and maybe they wouldn't want to be rescued anyway.'

Alfred responded "Councilors, I'm disappointed in you - you're clinging to wishful thinking. Our lives, every day, are proof that the Cylons meant it when they said they'd wipe out the whole human race - not just certain humans - All humans. There are many other such proofs. And if those are insufficient to convince you, then nothing ever can be. Please, face reality."

He sighed and continued "We know the capabilities of Cylon scanners, and a population of 30,000 humans will show up unmistakably for them if they get close enough. And we know they follow us and shadow us on both sides, sniffing for our trail. That's the only way they have had of following us. While scanning for our trail of fuel residue, they effectively scan everything. So they Will find Equalus. It is inevitable."

He concluded "And as far as it being dangerous - yes, everything we do in our situation is dangerous. But, given the nearby Cylons are currently out of fighters, this is actually less dangerous than it sounds. It was a big risk to Galactica to wait around near the 12 Colonies to gather this fleet of refugees. But she did it and aren't we refugees glad that she did? How can we do less for these people?"

Debate started up again & went long.

It took time to say enough words to make cowardice look like prudence, make self-interest look like the most practical option, and excuse yourself from moral obligations without looking too bad. The Councilors made sure to use plenty of words.

By the end of it, they were sounding as if choosing not to help the people of Equalus was an exceptionally noble and commendable choice.

Alfred was disgusted "Clearly you have decided, even though we haven't voted yet. It is clear you are Elitists who seem to think that humans from the 12 Colonies of Kobol - the 12 major human worlds, are worth saving, but humans from minor worlds are not. And you are hypocrites, who expect Earth do for us what we are apparently not willing to do for the people of Equalus. It's a parallel situation - taking risks by giving aid to those who need it - which you seem unwilling to recognize. Fine then - if you are too cowardly to help, I'll take it upon myself. My ship, the Liberty Ships, BattleSphere and FRD will all leave immediately to go evacuate the people of Equalus. The fleet won't be any weaker without us than it was before I built these ships. We have enough guns and Vipers on them to keep us safe from any attacks we are likely to receive while we're there. I've calculated it will take our shuttles only 15 hours to do the whole job - lots less if we simply land the 2 park ships and load them directly. Convincing them may not be easy, but we have to try."

It was amazing how fast, after that declaration, Alfred found himself in jail.

The Council simply held a quick vote, found him guilty of attempting to leave the fleet, and sent him to jail for a week, during which time he was forbidden all contact with anyone, so he couldn't give orders to his ships.

It was a minor crime & arguably had not even been committed - just talked about, so the sentence was light and there were no other repercussions.

But it was no accident that the sentence was a full week instead of just a couple days - with a delay of just a couple days Alfred might still have made it back to Equalus in time. But with a one week delay, there was no point in trying to go to Equalus, for a number of reasons.

The ragtag fleet would have moved too far to catch back up to again - if some ships went to Equalus, they'd be permanently cut off and on their own.

Worse, the Cylons would have found Equalus by then, and their Base Stars would almost certainly have received replacement fighters. Not that they needed fighters to wipe out the humans on Equalus, but that, with all those fighters, any ships that tried to go back would be doomed.

So Alfred mourned silently for the 30,000 plus who were sure to die.

His cellmate broke into his reverie "I thought I was in a bad mood, but you definitely look like someone who's had a bad day. What are you in for, strangling the guy who tortured your whole family to death in front of you?"

Alfred sighed "I was trying to prevent death-by-cowardice of 30,000 people."

"Interesting." His cellmate said. "Tell me all about it. It's not easy to pass the time in here."

Alfred did, including several tangents on his building activities and why he thought his ships could manage such a mission. They had plenty of time for rambling. Then he asked "What are you in for?"

"Piracy."

"Interesting." Alfred smiled. "Tell me all about it."

His cellmate did so.

After a while, Alfred broke in "So let me get this straight - you were commander of a Colonial Garrison and saw an opportunity to strike the Cylons. You organized a raid on a platinum mining operation of theirs, took out the garrison, pillaged it & then got out with your own team intact. Then on the way back you get pulled over by a Colonial warship and jailed for piracy? That's insane - they should give you a medal, not a jail sentence. That kind of initiative is exactly what good commanders are Supposed to do!"

"But see, we were going to keep the platinum for ourselves. They said that was piracy."

"Absurd! That's spoils of war & perfectly valid. Piracy laws are to protect the innocent, not your enemies in time of war. Weakening the enemy by denying them their stuff, when you can, is just good practice. And if you can strengthen yourself at the same time by keeping their stuff instead of just destroying it, even better. Militaries through history have recognized that and encouraged such initiative by allowing folks to keep what they can pillage. Sometimes they made it official by issuing something called a "Letter of Marque", and sometimes it was just informal - as opportunity presented itself. The only problem with it is if folks get so focused on it that they start pillaging before the fight is over, which was not the case with you and your team. And apart from all that, when you look at it another way, it's still legal - the laws of salvage say that anything you found at the Cylon base was yours, because the former owners were deceased with no heirs."

"Tell me about it. Maybe you can see why I'm a little bitter. By the way, my name is Croft."

"Well, Croft, I can see why you'd be upset. I'll do my best to get you and your team released, once I'm out of here and can talk to the Council again. Though I don't know that they'll listen - if they were inclined to, then I wouldn't be in here, would I? And I really hoped that, by honoring their request to build a couple ships for use as parks, they'd feel more positively towards me than the last Council did. So much for trying to curry favor."

"Wait," Croft said "You're not the same rogue Councilman who got 10 of the previous Council thrown in jail, then marooned them on a planet, to spend the rest of their lives farming, are you?"

When Alfred nodded, Croft, who had been seated on his bunk, rose and extended his hand "I'd like to shake your hand - those guys were scum. That was clear in just the few days they were here. The atmosphere, here in prison," he snorted, "really took a nosedive while they were around, but has, comparatively, been very nice since they, and the 'lifers' - those with life sentences - got marooned. Prison sucks, but it sucks less now, so thanks."

Croft was generally cynical and sarcastic, but mostly fair - that is, he was cynical about things that deserved cynicism.

Alfred could appreciate that.

Over their week together they talked a lot and even became friends.

The first thing Alfred did when he got back to his ship was catch up on events - there's no point in issuing orders when you don't know what has happened or changed that may affect those orders.

But the second thing he did was to petition the Council for a re-hearing for Croft and his team, to try to get them released.

That was categorically denied, And the Council made it clear that they didn't want to hear requests from him for a while.

Then he did the next best thing he could think of - he sent apologetic notes to Croft and his team, with game units to help pass the time, after finding out that it was legal to do so.

When he contacted Cecil his lawyer to check on that, he was also informed that Cecil had heard about his imprisonment & had looked into the laws, found a loophole, and pointed it out to Adama.

Basically, leaving the fleet was illegal. But there was a loophole in that. Adama, as military commander, could send armed ships on military missions at his discretion. That could be any type and number of ships, and any 'mission' at all, as long as Adama said it was military and showed it had a reasonable chance of combat. And, with the Cylons searching as hard as they were, any mission of any kind had a reasonable chance of combat.

That wouldn't help the people of Equalus - it was too late for them. But if a similar situation occurred, then all Alfred would have to do was get Adama to 'send him on a mission' and he could go rescue folks.

There were many other things to catch up on.

The 2 park ships had been finished and commissioned as Park One and Park Two. Park two was planted in fast-grown Tropical plants, while Park One had temperate plants, and climate.

Pods 21 and 22 had been finished as Liberty Ships 5 and 6. They would have been Liberty Ships 17 and 18, except the 12 which were built into the FRD never got commissioned as separate ships, so never got numbered that way.

Liberty Ship 5 was set to work making more Vipers.

Liberty Ship 6 was set to work making pre-Marron drives so they could refit ships of the ragtag fleet and save tylium.

2 more ships had been refitted with pre-Marron drives, laser turrets, and dockers, but that still left 198 ships in the ragtag fleet using Marron drives and tylium. They needed upgrade as soon as possible. The fleet was still using more fuel than they were finding.

That 198 didn't count the ships already converted to pre-Marron drives, nor the 4 that used older drives from Kobol. Nor did it count their strictly military ships: Galactica or Tenacity, since those would keep their Marron drives in order to give them every edge in combat they could get.

In fact, refitting ships with pre-Marron drives was becoming Alfred's biggest priority.

His favorite litany of "food, fuel, defense, and to achieve those, production" was working. They had made big strides in improving factory production, defense, and food production.

But while they now had 26 ships using pre-Marron drives: LowBoy, FRD, 6 Liberty Ships, 2 park ships, and 16 ships from the ragtag fleet, they hadn't actually made any net progress in fuel economy - what tylium was saved by the pre-Marron ships went to fuel their expanding number of Vipers.

They had a lot more Vipers now than before, and they were being kept busier defending the fleet from Cylons, whose attacks were more serious now that they knew where the human fleet would be and could gather themselves to attack, instead of scattering to search.

So they needed to make better progress with ship engines, and be more organized in how they chose which ships to refit next. They had a meeting about it and decided priorities.

Since the fleet's speed was the speed of the slowest ship, it would seem best to start the engine replacement project there - on the slowest ships, so the fleet could speed up. But, for the most part, those ships are not slow because of bad engine design, but because of bad maintenance practices - these were the most dilapidated rattletraps in the fleet. Doing any work on them would really require a total overhaul. Bolting a new shiny engine onto a weak rusted beam, and connecting it to corroded already-overloaded wiring, would otherwise be courting disaster.

While they did need to work on those ships, they would actually get the 'most bang for the buck' in working on other ships first - specifically the ones with the worst fuel efficiency or highest fuel usage.

The whole project was about saving tylium, and they'd save the most, the fastest, by first swapping out the engines that used the most tylium, whether from inefficiency or from sheer size.

Overhauling dilapidated ships could come a bit later - it would be fastest and easiest to do it when they were prepared to just move its entire passenger and cargo load to a new Liberty Ship or two, either permanently, or just while they worked. Working on empty ships would be easier, and could be a lot more thorough.

Construction of Pods 23, and 24 had been started while Alfred was in Jail, and they already had their major and minor floors done, as well as their engines and bridges. He resolved that, once they were completed, they should build pre-Marron drives.

But even with aggressive action in refitting pre-Marron drives, they would still need something more. It was too easy to use tylium and they just were not finding enough of it.

Alfred needed ideas, so he offered an Initiative Prize for anyone coming forward with something workable.


	14. Chapter 14

Chapter 14

Soon, a former stunt pilot named Rudel came forward with an idea, but he wouldn't say what it was until he could give a demonstration proving it was viable.

When Alfred accepted, Rudel shocked everyone by challenging Ensign Greenbean, one of Galactica's better Warriors, to a practice dogfight.

Then at the dogfight, Rudel shocked everyone again by showing up in his Training Viper, which he'd nicknamed Fang, since the long engines on either side of the cockpit resembled tusks or fangs.

The dogfight was to be "best of 5", meaning the first pilot to 3 victories would win the match. Both fighters had their lasers set low, to where they'd just stun any people, or temporarily scramble any electronics they hit.

Rudel was in Alfred's pilot training program, so the challenge was generally seen as him feeling he had something to prove.

Most of the fleet watched the dogfight - it was an interesting distraction, and it involved Greenbean, a minor celebrity. People never can seem to get enough of celebrities, for some reason.

The first round started like classic dogfights - with both sides maneuvering for position. At first it looked like Rudel, in his slow Training Viper, was at a significant disadvantage and that it was only a matter of time before Greenbean defeated him.

But all were stunned when Rudel found a way to turn the speed difference to his advantage - Instead of using his maneuverability to try get in position to shoot Greenbean - 'on Greenbean's tail' - he let Greenbean get on his own tail and used his maneuverability to make himself very hard to hit. Greenbean got in a couple shots, but with Rudel concentrating only on dodging those, and not at all on trying to shake Greenbean, they missed. Then Greenbean, with a tremendous speed advantage, inevitably flew right past Rudel. Rudel had been waiting for that and shot him, winning the first match.

In the second match, Greenbean avoided getting on Rudel's tail, not wanting to fly past and be shot again. Instead he kept the engagement at long range, and he and Rudel both made brief passes toward each-other, firing while pointed in the right direction & then turning away to get more distance between them.

Greenbean's long experience and significant skill gave him a hit on Rudel before he was himself hit.

Now the contest was tied, with each having won one match of the 3 they needed to win overall.

In the third match, Rudel changed things entirely - rather than fly quickly like a fighter, in a turning contest with the opponent to get shots and prevent him from getting shots back at you, he instead sat almost still - remaining more or less in place, like a static gun battery.

In doing so he demonstrated that, according to the Law of Inertia, the faster you are going the more space it takes you to turn. While it looked like he was almost immobile, he was in fact moving - just far far slower than ships, especially fighters, normally tend to move. He was moving slowly enough that he had no trouble turning completely around within his own 'footprint' - that is, he could turn 180 degrees, or even 360 degrees, in less space than the length of his own fighter. Yet he was moving fast enough to do sudden, even drastic, dodge maneuvers.

What this meant was that his nose, and his guns, were constantly pointed at Greenbean and firing. No matter where Greenbean went or what he did, he was continuously being barraged by Rudel's shots. And Greenbean could not even fire back without turning and flying straight towards Rudel, which made him a much easier target. He tried that a couple times and almost got hit. It was only his inspired and sudden side-slips that kept him from being hit. He shot back at Rudel, but Rudel could side-slip even harder and more suddenly, since he didn't have to fight as much inertia from forward movement to do so.

Greenbean kept trying various moves, only to continually rediscover that Rudel could move the nose of his Training Viper much faster than Greenbean could move his whole Viper. He was still trying various acrobatic moves when Rudel finally hit him and won the match.

Greenbean complained that such an approach was hardly a dogfight, and Rudel agreed not to do it again.

So the fourth match started out much as the first one did - both jockeyed for position and Greenbean, with his greater speed and experience, quickly got onto Rudel's tail. This time Greenbean kept at a distance so he'd have more time to make shots and get the 'kill' before he inevitably flew past Rudel and got shot. Greenbean, not bothering to dodge since he was behind Rudel and a Viper's weapons only pointed forwards, was closing in on Rudel, who was frantically dodging, when the match suddenly ended.

Everybody was stunned when it was announced that Greenbean, not Rudel, had been hit and so had lost.

It quickly came out that Rudel had modified his Training Viper to include some rear-firing weapons. He'd mounted 3 laser rifles - the same ones Alfred's soldiers used, with backpack-energizers, on each wing of his fighter, for a total of 9 laser rifles pointing backwards. They each fired at a lower energy than combat scanners were normally set to detect as a threat, so Greenbean had had no warning he was being fired at. It wasn't easy to aim backwards-firing weapons like that, but it was made easier by the fact that Greenbean was sure he couldn't be fired at while behind his target, so he wasn't even dodging. Rudel had not even set the laser rifles to shoot a continuous beam, considering that would make it too easy, and wanting a better contest than that.

While a hit from a laser rifle had nowhere near the energy that a hit from a Viper's main guns did, it still had enough power to blast a chunk the size of a human torso out of a fighter, or about half that if it was set to continuous beam. As densely packed as a fighter's systems were, that would be a severe hindrance at the very least, and an outright kill as often as not.

And Rudel had scored two hits, which the monitoring computers judged as disabling - enough to count as a kill.

Rudel had won.

And immediately on winning, he issued a statement in which he praised Greenbean's skill and acknowledged that his own victories were due to surprise more than anything else. He said that in a rematch, he expected Greenbean would probably defeat him.

He said he was sorry to embarrass Greenbean, one of the better known and respected of Galactica's pilots, but that he'd had good reasons. He needed to challenge a good pilot to make the dogfights results believable, but that he couldn't issue a general challenge or it was effectively certain that either Apollo or Starbuck would have accepted it. Rudel said that he had to avoid that, since he doubted that his surprises would defeat either of those very highly skilled pilots. So Rudel had studied Galactica's pilots before issuing his challenge, and decided that Greenbean, who was young, and therefore aggressive and impatient, would be most susceptible to surprises and therefore his best choice for an opponent.

Then he pointed out that, while surprises were underhanded in a fair fight, it was never a good idea to limit yourself to fighting fair - at least not in a war.

And, even more importantly, the Cylons were especially vulnerable to surprise - they had a very orderly approach to things and were particularly slow to adapt to the unexpected.

Then he got to his main point, which was that, with the right tactics, Training Vipers could defend themselves successfully against Cylon attacks. He'd been studying and practicing his 'high-maneuverability, low speed tactics', which he'd demonstrated in the dogfight, and he felt confident he could teach them to others, which he planned to do in any case.

He'd needed a dogfight challenge like this to prove that Training Vipers could defend themselves.

And with that now proven, he finally told Alfred his idea for getting more fuel.

He pointed out that Training Vipers have good scanners, so could be sent on long patrols to scout more sources of tylium, and while doing so, would not use up any tylium.

Not only did Rudel get the innovation award for thinking of a way to find more fuel, he got another for coming up with tactics to make Training Vipers viable in combat if needed, and another for the idea to arm Vipers with rear-firing weapons without impairing them in any way as long as they stayed out of planetary atmospheres - there the laser rifles would introduce drag. But they really had no need to enter a planet's atmosphere - the moment his new pilots had been accepted as a valid military force, Alfred had instructed them "A fighter is a wonderfully capable war-machine, which is useless and helpless when landed - never land your fighter. Crash land when or if you need to, but if you see something interesting that you want to land and investigate - don't. Instead call for a shuttle with a squad of soldiers to come land and investigate it."

Warriors were cross-trained as soldiers, but Alfred's pilots were not. So Adama's pilots still landed to investigate things, but Alfred's would not.

It was pointed out that flying long patrols in Training Vipers, looking for tylium, would give new pilots a lot more flight time and therefore be good training as well.

And not long after the practice dogfight, one of Alfred's designers pointed out a way for Rudel's Training Viper, and any Vipers similarly armed with laser rifles on the wings, to be upgraded. There was a little space between the rifles, so the addition of a simple motor would allow each rifle to swivel from side to side a bit, meaning the whole Viper did not have to be perfectly aligned with the target for the laser rifles, or at least some of them, to be aligned and fire. And with the 3 wings of a Viper all being angled different from each other, the 9 laser rifles could cover a fairly wide arc between them.

The designer also proposed a small camera be mounted on the rifles and send its output to a small new screen in the cockpit, so it'd be easier to aim.

Other designers saw that and enhanced the idea.

The screen in the cockpit got tied in to the Viper's computer. All Vipers had, for a long time, used image recognition software, connected their scanners, to look up contacts in the database of ships called the WarBook. So if your Viper's scanners detected something, it automatically looked it up in the WarBook and told you what it was. It was simple to add software to guide the gun-slewing motors on the laser rifles, so they'd automatically point, if it was in their firing arc, at any new contact the scanners detected.

With that, any potential target was automatically identified, just as before, but now, assuming it was in the right arc for any of the laser rifles to point at it, they'd automatically do so. All the pilot had to do was glance at the target screen to confirm it really was a Cylon, then push a button to fire.

Then they added the ability to fire by voice command, to make it even easier.

That made it a lot easier to use the rear guns - Rudel had found it difficult to split his attention between the front and back.

So Alfred gave out another Innovation Award to those designers, and set about making those changes to all 40 of his Training Vipers and all 66 of his real Vipers.

It wasn't their first long-range tylium scouting patrol of Training Vipers that got attacked by Cylons, but an attack came not long after that. They started the patrols big, with 12 Training Vipers in each tylium-search patrol. One such patrol got attacked by a patrol of 12 Cylons.

On their return, Alfred's pilots exulted "It was just like Rudel said - they *have* to overfly you, so make him miss when he shoots at you, then when he overflies, don't miss him."

"Yah," another one added "There's no better way to disrupt someone's aim than to shoot at him. So we can just sit almost still, face them and blast away at him until we hit. They didn't know how to respond, so we wiped them out and didn't even take any losses!"

They were pretty excited.

What's more, they had also found a small tylium deposit in a comet.

A group of shuttles, heavily escorted by fighters, went out and collected it, since every little bit helped.

That group ran also ran into a Cylon patrol, but the fighters took care of it.

It seemed that the Cylons had given up using small groups to attack the ragtag fleet - instead they were now using small patrols to shadow the fleet while they gathered large groups to attack with.

The small Cylon groups were not all around the Ragtag fleet all the time - that'd take a lot of fighters, and every time the Cylons collected a lot of fighters, they sent them in to attack the fleet and do some damage.

And they did indeed do some damage.

The repairs were mostly not a big deal. The personnel losses were. There were not even a million humans left, all told. They could not afford to lose any.

So Alfred's group kept building defenses, thinking the more they got, the less damage they would take in each attack.

In the meantime, shuttles going out to collect asteroids started going in groups, for mutual defense, and they followed Viper patrols more closely than before. They didn't want to lose any shuttles to Cylon patrols. And there was always a Cylon patrol or two somewhere near the ragtag fleet.

Alfred was, as he so often was, coordinating construction efforts, when Sally came rushing in.

"Unc, don't go to jail again!"

"What?"

"Last time a small human colony was found you went to jail - don't go this time."

"Sally, how do you always know things even before the official word comes out?"

"I know the right people" she smiled.

"So tell me about what was found."

"Oh Unc, it's fascinating! Someone developed a new Recon Viper and got Starbuck to fly the test mission, during which he contacted some humans. They were from a Colonial prison we apparently forgot about a thousand yahrens ago. During that whole time, they've been making Ambrosia for the war effort and piling it up waiting for Colonial Warriors to come get it. Amazingly, something went wrong with their society - people that had been sent to prison a thousand yahrens ago stayed in prison all their lives, and so did their descendants all the way until now!"

Alfred's communicator chimed and cut her off.

He answered the call and found that he was being summoned to a special Council session on Galactica.

He had to leave for it right away, but not before Sally promised to visit him if he insisted on going to prison again.

While on the shuttle on the way to Galactica, he called Floyd and arranged to have him start immediately building 4 more Liberty Ships, in case they needed the space for refugees. They kept a continual string of new ones building anyway, so it just rushed the schedule a bit.

And, if they hurried, they might get the hulls complete and airtight before arriving and picking up any new refugees, assuming that was what was going to happen.

Hulls were easy to build, and could be towed while they finished the rest - such as engines.

Floyd also promised to visit him in prison, if it came to that.

In a way, it was touching.

Viewed another way, it suggested they thought he was too stubborn.

Alfred would have to think about that, and possibly re-evaluate his approach to things.

In the meantime he got his speed-dial ready to call his lawyer Cecil if needed.

When he got to the Council chamber, things got right to business. Adama was the only one scheduled to present anything, and he began right away.

"This meeting is mainly to inform you all of military developments. It's military, and therefore my purvue, because combat has already occurred and will occur again. While testing a new Recon Viper, one of our Warriors encountered a fighter chasing a shuttle. Both were thousand-yahren-old Colonial designs piloted by humans. Though unarmed, our Warrior intervened and broke up the fight, then landed to investigate. There, he was accosted and his Recon Viper stolen. The Recon Viper then immediately sent a long-range encoded message to the 12 Colonies. We dispatched 2 more Vipers to recover it, which they did. In doing so, they discovered a Colonial prison outpost that had been forgotten for a thousand yahrens. While the discovery was being sorted out, the Cylons, who had traced the message, arrived and attacked. Luckily it was just a scout patrol, and our 3 Vipers defeated it. We've sent more Vipers to support them, since Cylons do not give up. They met and defeated a second Cylon attack. Galactica, with the fleet following, has also turned towards the prison planet, which is named Proteus. We plan to evacuate it. This is unlike the last human world we discovered," he glanced at Alfred "since the Cylons already know of their presence and have attacked twice, and because they have requested evacuation. I will now answer questions."

In the ensuing discussion, Alfred learned that Proteus and its supporting farms had a total population of a little less than 9000 people. He would have little trouble accommodating that many, which was good, because any that wanted to survive would need to be evacuated.

The people of Proteus had not been excited about evacuating at first. But, with each Cylon attack, many of them had changed their minds.

The other Council members assumed that housing refugees was Alfred's problem, and he was fine with that.

But, despite making excuses about not having room to store refugees, they were all remarkably eager to help store the ambrosia the planet had. They did not plan to recover much stuff from the planet - just the ambrosia.

They said the rest of the stuff would be fine where it was, because Cylons attack humans, and anything humans are using for their support, but they don't attack uninhabited planets or unattended stuff.

That was true as far as it went, but Alfred saw no need to abandon anything the fleet could use. So he intended to run his own salvage operations while he could.

Other interesting tidbits that came out of the meeting were that, on the wall of one prison cell on Proteus, an unusual prisoner had long ago drawn a map to Earth. That map agreed with the location information they'd gotten on Kobol.

It was nice confirmation that they were still on the right course.

Then there was a tantalizing yet inadequate summary of the Recon Viper's abilities and design. The other Council members didn't much care about it. Alfred did, and got the info on a data crystal from Adama.

He spent the shuttle trip back looking over that data crystal.

He learned that the Recon Viper was sometimes called CORA after it's very impressive computer. It stood for Computer - Oral Response Activated, and was quite capable, including the ability to fly the whole Viper, and do it better than most pilots. It needed a pilot to provide voice commands, since it could not decide things for itself, but it executed those commands very well - rapidly and with great precision. It could even understand and follow really general commands, like 'fly us to that planet' or 'engage the Cylons" or "protect the Galactica".

The Recon Viper also had double the range, speed and maneuverability of other Vipers, and much better sensors as well. It achieved that performance by adding a second pulse generator on all the engines - something that worked fine with Marron drives but couldn't work with pre-Marron drives, since they didn't use pulse generators.

To make room for the improvements, they'd removed the laser generator, which is why CORA was effectively unarmed.

Though in their haste, they'd left the laser emitters in place on the Recon Viper's wings. They couldn't fire without a generator, but their very presence gave Alfred ideas, the first of which was that each emitter was about the size of a laser rifle with it's backpack-sized energizer. He planned to look into the possibility of replacing the inactive emitters with laser rifles and their energizers. That wasn't much armament compared to what a Viper normally mounted, but anything was better than nothing. And with the CORA's great maneuverability, even a very weak armament could be effective. As Rudel had recently demonstrated, even laser rifle fire can disable fighters, though such armament would be completely ineffective in attacking Base Stars - it wouldn't get past their force shields.

Alfred was full of plans for Recon Vipers when he walked into his office, saw someone there he didn't know, and started to back out, apologizing that he must have absentmindedly entered the wrong office.

The woman swiftly stood, and her apologies, and Alfred's, stumbled over each-other. Before they'd sorted it out, Sally came in from the adjoining office, having been summoned as the woman stood.

"Unc, meet your new secretary, Lydia."

After introductions, Alfred and Sally went for a private discussion in Sally's office.

As soon as the door closed, Alfred complained

"Not another matchmaking attempt Sally?"

"You need someone Unc. She's smart, and really nice, and has red hair which I know you like and..."

"We've talked about this - you know I'm not ready yet - not yet over the...loss." He clenched his jaw for a moment as he tried to deal with them memory of his family's death.

"Unc, Just try."

Alfred sighed. "Ok, but the first time she gets mad at me for not reading her mind, she's gone."

"Ok."

They hugged and both got back to work.

Right from the start, it didn't go well. Any new hire needs some time to get up to speed. Alfred had no problem with that.

Lydia was eager to please. The problem was that she kept trying to anticipate what Alfred wanted. Alfred had never met anybody who thought like him, except his deceased wife. Lydia didn't think like him either. So in every attempt to guess where he was going with something, she guessed wrong & ended up having to backtrack.

That wasted a lot of time, and was frustrating, but Alfred managed to ignore it by assigning her her own work rather than having her assist him in his.

The fleet had arrived at Proteus and Alfred and his folks got busy with the evacuation.

The Council got busy too - at least as far as sending all their shuttles to recover the vast amounts of ambrosia stacked in the warehouses, all over most of the spaceport, and in nearby fields.

Alfred recovered the people first, then anything usable they could find at the extensive spaceport, distillery, farms, and the repair and maintenance facilities for their fighters and shuttles. He recovered the fighters and shuttles too, even though they were antiquated designs. They could examine them later to see if they should be upgraded, or just scrapped.

Well before Alfred was done, the Council had recovered all the ambrosia. Alfred hadn't thought it could be done anywhere near that quickly - the amounts were vast. But they'd been enthusiastic about it, and had enthusiastic help.

So none of the ambrosia went up to Alfred's ships, which didn't bother him - he figured it would be rationed out to those who wanted it, just as other things were. Even the Borellians would be happy about that. They didn't drink alcohol - they saw it as a weakness & despised anything weak. But they could easily trade their ration to others.

The inhabitants of Proteus, including the former prisoners, were quite patriotic and happily donated the Ambrosia, and much else, to the war effort even though they could have exercised their ownership claims.

Loading went quickly. Everyone was motivated to get going as fast as they could, since the Cylons kept attacking, each attack bigger than the last, while they were there.

The evacuation was done, and the fleet got moving again, just before a full wall of 300 Cylons attacked. The attack went like so many other had - all the Cylons were destroyed while the humans lost some fighters and took some damage to various ships.

As the attack ended, Alfred called Adama and strongly urged that a full strike be launched at the Base Star which had launched the attack.

Adama listened patiently as Alfred said

"Cylon attacks are just increasing - we have to do something to change things up. The problem is that they can outmanufacture us. Even if every ship in our fleet was a factory ship, and the fleet was 10 times as big, we could not match the production of 1 Cylon planet - and they have many planets. So they effectively have infinite fighters. What has saved us so far is partly that it takes a while for their new production to reach the front, where they send it to fight little by little as it arrives, and mainly that they had to scatter to find us. Well they don't have to scatter anymore - they know where we are. So if I can't convince you to change course, say off in a random direction for a couple weeks before heading towards Earth again, then at least interrupt the flow of enemy fighters - Base Stars take a very long time to build, and if we hunt down some of those, they can't launch at us as often."

Adama thought about it in silence for a moment, then agreed, but only because Galactica had recently gotten her replacement Fire Control Director installed, bringing her 400 laser turrets back to full effectiveness.

While the Vipers launched and assembled, the Recon Viper took off immediately, to go find the Cylon Base Star that must be nearby.

They had not attacked a Base Star since well before the loss of the 12 Colonies, so the pilots were not very confident. To counteract that, they sent more than the 3 squadrons that standard doctrine called for.

Galactica still held back one of her four squadrons, but Alfred contributed 60 Vipers and Tenacity sent 6 Vipers.

All told, it was a little over 4 and a half squadrons.

It didn't take long for CORA the Recon Viper to find the Cylon Base Star.

Cylon Base Stars had gotten into the habit of attacking with all the fighters they had and not holding any back for defense. That way their attacks were more effective. And it carried no risk. At least, it didn't while the human fleet had been incapable of counterattacking.

It carried a very big risk now, as the Cylons learned.

The Vipers swept in on the Cylon Base Star and a support freighter that happened to be there - likely carrying consumables to keep the Base Star going, or possibly even more Cylon Raiders to reload the Base Star's empty fighter bays.

But if it was carrying fighters, they hadn't been unpacked yet - there were no Cylon fighters flying to oppose the Vipers.

The Base Star was armed with many anti-fighter defenses, so the Vipers had to dodge and be as careful as they would be in a dogfight, though in different ways.

But despite the Base Star's efforts, it was doomed.

Vipers made pass after pass, strafing the ship as much as they could while trying not to get hit themselves.

Damage from the 186 Vipers didn't add up as quickly as it would from an attack of 300 Cylon Raiders, but it added up quickly enough. System after system on the Base Star failed.

Just before it exploded, it was observed to be almost ready to flee in a hyperspace bubble. But the time it took to calculate such a bubble's parameters, in the presence of so many objects un-attuned to it, was just too long a delay. It failed to get away.

It probably would have escaped if only 3 squadrons had been sent after it, but the extra Vipers, and the damage they did, shortened the time she had.

Tenacity's Vipers broke off their attack on the Base Star slightly early and veered instead to attack the Cylon Freighter. With precision targeting, they took out its engines and disabled it, then called for shuttles loaded with soldiers to come capture it.

Tenacity itself showed up first, and landed all the damaged Vipers that might not have made it back to Galactica. She didn't wait for the fleet to send shuttles & simply launched her own instead, to start the capture right away.

It didn't take the No-Men long to capture the Cylon Freighter, which was only crewed by 2 Cylons anyway. The No-Men were a little surprised when 150 Cylon pilots joined the 2 Cylon crew in attempting to fight off the No-Men. But the Borellians had brought all the troops they had on-hand - 2 full platoons of 50 each, armed and equipped as the rest of Alfred's soldiers were. What with having better equipment than the Cylons, and their greater fighting ability, the Borellians won handily, though the 'slaughter' among the decoy balloons they used, was immense.

They took the Cylon freighter under tow & rejoined the fleet where LowBoy, with far more engine capacity, took over the tow, then they started inventorying the ships contents and situation.

The Cylon freighter was named F104, in the Cylon style of just naming the series and then the ship number in that series. It had a full load of 300 fighters with spare parts, and fuel to run them all for a few missions each.

It had not launched any fighters to participate in the battle, because freighters are not set up to launch and operate fighters - that's what Base Stars are for. Fighters are shipped partially disassembled anyway, so they can fit more in the same space.

What was perplexing is why they'd only sent 150 Pilots - enough to crew just 50 of the 300 fighters.

Alfred was just starting to get into examining the Cylon equipment when he was informed by the Council that they were taking ownership of F104 and Alfred had just a day to empty it before it got turned over to Hephaestus for refit.

Technically F104 and its contents belonged to the Borellians, since they had captured it. But the Council could legally take ships that had no Administrators, and the Borellians didn't really want F104, since it would never be much good in a fight, and anyway they were going to be getting the new Frigates Alfred was building. Those Frigates were coming along nicely too.

The Borellians definitely didn't want Cylon Raider fighters. They said Alfred could keep those if he wished.

So he hurriedly had the Cylon fighters, parts etc, transferred to Shell 2 of the BattleSphere, which was an enormous Shuttle Bay and storage area for miscellaneous stuff anyway.

During the transfer, they noted that 5 out of every 6 of the captured Cylon Raiders were set up with no room for pilots - they had bombs instead and were apparently intended for remote control.

Alfred was so busy looking over new stuff, trying to figure out pilotless Raiders, and thinking of CORA variations, that he didn't even notice the victory party that started to celebrate the destruction of the Base Star.

The party grew, and expanded, and eventually took over almost the whole fleet.

They'd had celebrations before and had no trouble from it. But this time they had also just recovered an inconceivably large stockpile of ambrosia, which got consumed with great gusto as part of the celebration.

It had been a long time since there was much ambrosia available, and the tiny rations of it which folks had had were nowhere near enough to get them drunk.

Folks who used to drink a lot, and had therefore developed the ability to 'hold their liquor' had long since lost that ability without realizing it.

This ambrosia was particularly strong, having aged for a long time, and nobody was used to hard drinking anymore.

So they got amazingly drunk far more quickly than they had expected, and more quickly than most of them realized.

A number of folks, including 3 Council members, even drank themselves to death.

Alfred didn't notice the celebration until Lydia, his new secretary, stumbled into the office and complained "You're mean - you won't even tell me what you think of my new hairdo."

"Truthfully," Alfred replied "I didn't even notice. You're drunk - go home and sleep it off."

As Lydia obediently stumbled out of the office, Alfred called Sally and told her about it, concluding "I can't deal with guessing at the meaning of hints and such. Transfer Lydia to another ship, working for somebody else."

"Aww Unc, she's just drunk, cut her some slack. Almost everybody is drunk, and she didn't do anything really harmful."

Alfred sighed, and after a moment replied "Ok, one more chance. But only one. What do you mean that everybody is drunk?"

Then he heard all about the fleet-wide party.

He immediately started calling people to find out the extent of the situation, including, especially their defenses - it wouldn't take but one party like this to wipe them all out, if the wrong people were all drunk and the Cylons happened to attack.

While he was just starting to make calls, the Cylons did attack, and he found out by observation just how ready they were.

650 soldiers - 3 companies plus a platoon - all who had been trained so far - trooped out onto the surface of the BattleSphere Mousetrap, bringing with them 65 tripod lasers - one per squad of 10 soldiers - and 80 "Bantam" light vehicles with their tripod lasers. 70 of those were normally dedicated to moving 3rd company quickly, while the other 2 companies had 5 Bantams each for scouting and general utility purposes.

All 30 of Mousetrap's Artillery Crawlers joined them on the sphere, ready to fight.

The Borellians who led and trained Alfred's soldiers neither drank, nor allowed it in those who they were responsible for.

100 more Borellians, similarly equipped, came out of Tenacity and got ready to fight from her surface.

Tenacity herself, and her Vipers, were clearly ready to fight, as were some, though not many, of the laser turrets and armed shuttles from Alfred's ships.

Very little of the rest of the armed ships of the fleet seemed to be able to fight - only a couple were reacting, though sluggishly.

Mousetrap and Tenacity raced to meet the oncoming Cylons and draw their attention, which was easy for Mousetrap since the Cylons liked to attack her anyway.

Alfred, Sally, Floyd and a few others manned what weapons and control consoles they could, on LowBoy and a couple nearby armed-but-impaired ships, and moved to join the fight.

As the wall of 300 Cylon fighters closed in on Mousetrap, its artillery crawlers tried a new innovation - they launched smaller mines. Previous attempts to launch mines at incoming Cylons had not worked well - the first instance of anything caught them offguard and worked ok, but after that, they recognized what was happening and simply shot down the mines. Using laser weapons to shoot things down was easy, as long as the targets were not maneuvering erratically like fighters.

So the first instance of launching a mine, disguised as a rock, had worked fine and destroyed several Raiders. But follow-on attempts had all failed.

Even the efforts of one brave pilot, who had loaded a mine into a shuttle, charged the Cylons, and released it, had failed. He'd survived, but the mine, even accelerated like that, had simply been shot down.

But the artillery crawlers still had large launchers, so they kept trying to find ways to use them effectively.

The latest attempt was called a "Small Mine".

Regular mines had a blast radius of a thousand metrons, wherein all fighters would be destroyed and big ships damaged. They were the size of a Bantam scout vehicle.

Small mines were about the size of a man's torso, and had a blast radius of 100 metrons.

Each launcher on an artillery crawler could launch half a dozen small mines at a time, plus a dozen decoys tethered to them.

And, as soon as they could, they all launched full loads.

Apparently this was too similar a tactic to launching full-sized mines - the Cylons immediately started shooting them down.

It was only the fact that there were many targets - 180 actual mines and 360 more decoys, that allowed some to reach their targets and detonate. Even then it wouldn't have worked without the group of Vipers approaching and thereby causing the Cylons to begin erratic maneuvers, making it harder for them to aim.

Galactica, coming from the far end of the fleet again, was clearly operating at reduced effectiveness, and her Vipers had launched late. Some were kind of wobbly, and generally flew sloppily, but shaped up as they approached the Cylons.

The timing of it all, accidental though it was, allowed 4 mines to get through and detonate, taking out 71 Cylon fighters between them.

That certainly helped, but by no means ended the fight.

The Cylons could see that the human response was weaker than usual, so they pressed the attack, with most heading for their most dangerous enemy - the Vipers.

But in approaching the Vipers, they passed close to the Mousetrap, and all the guns waiting on the surface reaped an amazing harvest. So did Tenacity's guns as she dodged out from behind Mousetrap and joined in the shooting. They'd all held their fire until the Cylons were close and easy to hit, then surprised them and sent out a very impressive volley, taking down all but 29 Raiders, which the incoming Vipers, wobbly though they were, defeated without trouble.

Alfred would have encouraged a counter-strike at the Base Star that must be out there, but there were not enough Viper Pilots sober to make a good try of it. And of their full-sized ships, only Galactica could take on a Base Star with any chance of success - any of the rest would easily be destroyed by the Base Star's anti-ship weaponry.

And she wasn't at her best just now either.

Worse, the effects of drunkenness seemed to be really settling in - some of the Vipers wobbled so much that they were damaged on landing.

And several ships were starting to wobble too - coming close to collisions with other ships, which made them dodge. This they did in a wobbly manner and almost caused other collisions.

So, to avoid cascading collisions, the fleet had to come to a full stop while people sobered up.

They were lucky that nothing further attacked them until late the next day. That attack was just a single Cylon squadron - probably all the Cylons had available just then - not all Cylon freighters carried a full 300 replacement fighters - the D series only carried one squadron of 75.

Apparently they Cylons could tell the humans were impaired somehow, so had sent what they had in hopes of doing some damage.

When the Cylon squadron saw 4 squadrons of Vipers coming to meet them, they turned tail and ran. Less than half of them escaped.

It was judged best not to attack the Base Star they'd come from, since many pilots were hung over and so losses would be high.


	15. Chapter 15

Chapter 15

While others were 'sleeping it off', Alfred was planning political campaigns. He'd heard by then of the 3 Councilors who had drunk themselves to death, and once again was doing his best to get good replacements - folks with common sense and real world experience - voted in.

He'd had folks looking through his collection of movies, and selecting any about corrupt politicians. These, and any shows making useful political points, he sent to all his game units for free, so they could each watch them if and when they chose.

And he further sent around several speeches, wherein he made the point that politicians all have one skill - that of pretending to be great guys: personable, wise, thoughtful, and benevolent. A few actually are - very very few. And many politicians have no other skill than pretending to be personable etc. Unfortunately, they are very skilled at the pretense.

He plead with all the people of the fleet, through all means available to him, urging that nobody whose lives or jobs were primarily in the world of ideas, including politicians, academics, lawyers etc, should be elected. He stressed that only those with the types of real-world experience which teach common sense should be elected, so they can accurately judge whether an idea is good or bad.

He clarified, using farmers as an example, saying: a farmer knows that, if it takes 2 acres planted to feed his family, he'd better not 'save money on seed' by planting only one acre. Rather, he'll probably plant 5 or more, if he can, in case yields are low due to weather, disease, vermin etc. And if he gets more than needed, he can sell the rest. He also knows that if he plants corn, corn is what will grow, not watermelons nor magical money trees. And he knows that unless he waters it, weeds it, fertilizes it, and otherwise takes care of it, his crop will die. So he learns basic principles of reality, like hard work and "what you sow is what you reap" and "if you want 5 acres to grow, you have to plant 5 acres or more - it won't just grow on its own."

These are basic principles that politicians somehow manage to be ignorant of - they live in a world of ideas without enough feedback on those ideas - what really works and what doesn't.

Farmers and others with real-world experience giving them a sense of practicality, do not easily fall for bad ideas like destroying all your weapons in hopes that the enemy who has sworn to exterminate will you will suddenly desist. Nor do they believe that a hungry wolf will decline to try to eat you if you are a vegetarian.

Alfred did his best, but poll numbers changed only a little. What got elected, again, was career politicians - people whose names were known.

One was known particularly well, but not for good things.

Councilwoman Tonc was indeed famous, but famous for being corrupt. She had not been convicted of anything - her accusers tended to die, flee, or go suspiciously silent. And she was very very good at pretending to be wise, thoughtful, and benevolent, though most of the time she really struggled with pretending to be personable.

But her fame had carried her to election victories in the past, and now she was again elected - to the Council.

It wasn't long after Tonc was elected that a man approached Alfred offering a bribe if he voted a certain way on an upcoming issue in Council. The man was arrested and tried, but never gave out any information.

Not long after that, Alfred started getting threats that unless he refrained from all Council votes, he would suffer an unfortunate accident and die.

This kind of thing exactly fitted with the always-unproven rumors of Councilwoman Tonc's behavior - decades worth of rumors, all consistent.

The fact that Tonc could be elected at all, threatened to destroy Alfred's faith in humanity.

All 3 new Councilors despised Alfred from the get-go. They said it was because he had "campaigned against them", yet he had said not a single word about specific candidates.

In fact they could easily tell that Councilors that went along with the rest did fine, while Councilors that stood independently, like Alfred, got marginalized, excluded, villified, opposed and persecuted. That mostly didn't apply to Adama, who was so famous and widely loved that nobody dared oppose him too much or too openly.

But Adama was unique.

The rest of the Councilors did not want to risk getting treated like Alfred, so the new Councilors mimicked the behavior of the old ones. It was a lot like a pack of dogs all turning on the outsider in order not to be seen as siding with the outsider and thereby getting the same treatment.

Because of the threats, Alfred hired a couple bodyguards and had everything checked, which is why he survived - in checking his shuttle just before a scheduled trip to a Council meeting, they found sabotage. The shuttle engines had been altered to overheat, overload, and explode about 5 centons into its next flight. Had it exploded, the alterations would likely have been untraceable.

No evidence of who did it or why could be found.

Alfred went and voted, but took a different shuttle.

Then for a while, things were quiet enough that he could concentrate on building things.

His designers had looked over CORA and had some recommendations.

They basically wanted to build 2 variants of CORA the Recon Viper, with three different packages for one variant.

The 1st variant was just as it already existed, but with laser rifles, assisted by backpack-sized energizers, in place of her inactive laser emitters.

They called that version Cora 1a.

Cora 2a was just like 1a, including laser rifles, but instead of a pilot had a pair of small mines and an ejector for them, built under a windscreen that looked like the normal pilot canopy but was actually part of the upper mine. It was thought that this version could fly towards enemy fighter formations, release mines & retreat, or do a similar 'bombing run' on a Base Star.

Cylons were good at shooting down mines, but that might not be so if they had no time to react, as would be the case with a very fast delivery by a radically maneuvering fighter.

This variant, and 2b and 2c, had originated when Floyd, looking over the specifications about Cora's ability to fly herself according to voice commands, had asked "why do the voice commands have to originate inside the fighter - couldn't they be transmitted from a nearby one?"

They could.

And doing so freed up space that could be profitably used otherwise.

In addition to freeing up space, going pilotless would even help maneuverability - CORA could turn fast enough to make pilot black out despite inertial dampers, so, with a pilot of board, CORA had to hold back a bit and not maneuver to her full potential.

Cora 2b was also like 1a, but in this case swapped out the pilot for a new package they had created - a modified LandRam laser turret, plus the energizers and motorization that needed, and the connections into the Viper's computer and sensors so CORA could fully control it.

The turret could aim in almost any direction, and had high-speed gun-slewing motors, so it was expected that this version would do very well in dogfights, shooting anything around it with the turret, as well as targets directly in front of its laser rifles.

Because it had a turret, all the usual jockeying for position and maneuvering would be unnecessary for it to attack, so it could use the entirety of its great maneuverability for dodging.

If computers did one thing well, it was multi-tasking. So while a human pilot may not be able to keep track of that many things happening at once, it was expected that Cora would have no problems.

And the last version, Cora 2c kept the original laser emitters, and made them active by filling the space which the pilot would normally use with laser generators, specially redesigned to fit the space.

After discussions and fine-tuning, all 4 designs were accepted. They started building 2 of each for testing.

Things had been getting tense in Alfred's office - tense enough for him to actually notice, despite a head full of building plans. So he was relieved when he arrived one morning and Lydia wasn't there. The tension was gone with her.

He went and asked Sally about it.

"Sorry Unc, I transferred her. Even though she was drunk at the time, she heard and remembered your statement that you didn't even notice her new hairdo. She resented that, since she'd done it to impress you. Then she started resenting other things, like not anticipating you very well, which she blamed on you. She'll be happier in her new job."

Alfred snorted "If she was trying to impress me, she should have at least done her homework - she cut her hair short and there is no variation of short hair that I've ever found attractive. What's in style doesn't interest me at all."

"I thought you didn't notice" Sally teased.

"Not before she pointed it out, but when she complains like that, it draws it to one's attention. I don't need a secretary anyway."

Sally nodded and they got down to discussing work projects.

One of those was about studying the Cylon fighters they had captured. 250 of them were pilotless, had explosive suicide bombs built in as well as the usual lasers, and were meant to be remote-controlled by the other 50 which were normal except for the additional remote controls.

Someone had suggested using them, which raised intriguing tactical possibilities. First, though, they had to figure out how to reassemble and operate them. So a small team was being assigned to that.

They also wanted to look at the possibility of swapping the drives on some of them.

Cylon fighters used a version of the Marron drive, which they stole from humans long ago. They had similar performance to Vipers, but ended up being comparatively sluggish because Cylon pilots were sluggish compared to humans.

Alfred wanted to investigate the possibility of putting pre-Marron drives on a few Cylon Raiders, to make them be practice-dogfight partners for training purposes.

One of the hardest things for new Viper pilots to master was the amazing speed and maneuverability of their Vipers. And the confusion and rapid pace of a dogfight was when they were most likely to make mistakes.

But if a pre-Marron drive Viper were to do practice dogfights versus a pre-Marron drive Raider, it would effectively be like a regular dogfight, but in slow motion.

Not exactly, but something like that.

And in theory, that'd ease new pilots into their new skills better - they could learn slow-motion dog-fighting first, then later progress to the full speed version. That was the theory at least.

They planned to try it out as soon as they could.

But that too required investigation into the workings of the Cylon fighters, which had come without any manuals.

Then they talked about more mines, the recently completed Liberty Ships 7 and 8 - formerly pods 23 and 24, the almost completed pods 25 through 28, and the just-begun pods 29 and 30. They also talked about the progress the FRD was making in building new Frigates, Firebases, and Destroyer Escorts - all of those had their hulls done and looked like ships already, though they were still mostly-empty husks - each still needed lots of work to finish their interiors before they'd be ready.

Then Sally surprised Alfred by asking "Who is Croft - he says he knows you?"

Alfred told her all about his time in jail with Croft, and Croft's history, then asked

"You've spoken with him? How? He's still in prison."

Sally replied

"I play an online space battles game on my game unit. One of the better players, Croft, who just started recently, send me a friend request & invited me to his platoon. We talked in in-game chat. He plays well and has been helping me."

Alfred thought a moment & said "That's nice of him. I'll have to find a way to thank him - though there's not much I can do directly, at least while he's in prison. I'll call Cecil and ask what is possible."

"Speaking of what is possible," Sally said "I wanted to ask you a favor. I'm sure it will work, but it's new for us."

"Go ahead and ask."

"Well," Sally continued "Back on Scorpia I used to watch some shows about people's ordinary lives - one about finding and restoring antiques, another about the day to day operations of a pawn shop - things like that. They called it 'Reality TV'."

Alfred rolled his eyes, but she continued.

"People are asking about Rudel, your pilot. That demonstration dogfight with Greenbean really got people's attention and they're curious. Rudel is friendly and talkative - I think he'd do well as the star of a show like that. I have people lined up with experience in filming and producing such shows. I just want a go-ahead and some resources."

When it was clear that that was her full pitch, Alfred said

"Sometimes I wonder if you are all a different species than me - how could that possibly be interesting?"

Sally smiled, knowing that response amounted to an ok.

"People will watch it, trust me".

They discussed a few details, then Alfred had to hurry off to the latest Council meeting.

In the shuttle on the way, there was an announcement about a tragedy - the shuttle carrying 2 Council members to the same meeting had caught fire and everyone aboard had asphyxiated.

He was still dealing with the shock of that when he got a new shock.

Councilman Clemith showed up to the meeting with bruises all over his face. When asked, he said he'd fallen down. He did not volunteer any more information and gave every impression that he didn't want to talk about it.

Several other Councilors acted oddly too - avoiding eye contact and acting as if they were afraid.

There wasn't much time to think about that before the first item on the agenda came up. It was titled simply "leadership", with no additional information given.

It turned out to be about dissolving the Council and vesting all its power in one person.

When Alfred and Adama started voicing objections, other Councilors moved and seconded that debate be tabled and the vote be taken immediately. The vote to stifle discussion passed, then immediately afterwards, Tonc was elected "Dictator for Life" and granted limitless power.

She then adjourned the meeting, and soon thereafter started making proclamations. Most of them were about procedural things - appointing her cronies to positions of power, granting them, and herself, privileges, and things like that.

Some proclamations were aimed at trying to ease the transition, such as decrees about celebrations in her honor, multiplying the ambrosia ration and so on.

Some were just stupid, like when she decreed that all ships be painted to resemble crocodiles "to enhance the morale of the people".

While she was busy with that kind of thing, Adama and Alfred were each busy investigating various irregularities with the whole event.

The shuttle fire that killed 2 Councilors was unexplained, though curiously the investigation into it, and into why 2 Councilors were on the same shuttle in the first place when normally each had their own, was quashed at the highest levels.

Before he lost access to read them, Alfred found medical records from 2 different hospitals, each showing that a Councilor had had broken limbs fixed the night before Tonc's election, which he was coming to think of as "the coup".

Adama found that 3 Councilors had acquired, untraceably, and very recently, extremely large amounts of wealth.

So there were many indications of illicit activity, but no solid proof.

They were so busy researching things, that they each skipped going to the next meeting Tonc called.

She said she "needed to consult the wisdom of former leaders" and called in, as 'special advisers', all Councilors from the recently dissolved Council of 12.

All went, except Adama and Alfred.

No observers or aides were invited.

Alfred was interrupted in his researches when Sally rushed in to his office, hugged him, and held on, repeating "You're safe, you're safe."

When she calmed down, the details came out.

A broadcast had gone out, from a game unit at Tonc's meeting, to all game units.

At first very few had listened in, but the numbers quickly skyrocketed, and even more were listening to the full recording now that it was all over.

The recording had started with former-Councilman Clemith asking, in the not-so-smart plodding way he usually reverted to in private, "Why did you turn off the microphones and lock the doors?"

Tonc responded, in very sarcastic and superior tones that, while the "useful idiots" of the Council had been very useful to her, except for the 2 fools who couldn't see reason and so had to have a tragic shuttle accident, it was time for her to finish consolidating her power. She said that the remains of the Council was potentially dangerous to her, both as a rallying point for any subversives who arose, and a source of embarrassing information. She concluded "Time to die", then a series of rapid-fire laser blasts set to stun were heard. After that, there were faint sounds which people interpreted as the rooms microphones being turned on and the doors unlocked. Then a door opened & closed. Then there was silence for just under a centon before a bomb went off, ending the recording.

Adama's Warriors were already rushing to the scene before the bomb exploded. They found Tonc in a nearby restroom pretending that she just stepped out for a moment & was lucky to avoid the blast.

They arrested her, suspended all government by her appointees, and implemented full Martial Law while the whole situation was investigated.

Scraps of fur from Alfred's pants were found in the remains of the bomb, with his fingerprints all over the bomb parts, but because of the recording, It was clear that that evidence had simply been planted to distract blame.

Other than the recording from the game unit, there was no other evidence found.

But that was still plenty to convict Tonc.

And when convicted and sentenced to being marooned on a farm-able planet, she vindictively opened up on her co-conspirators. She gave, apparently out of pure spite, plenty of evidence to convict 32 others.

All her actions as Dictator were ruled void, because she's been elected invalidly, though the one ship that had already been painted to resemble a crocodile got left as it was.

She and her 32 co-conspirators were marooned on the next farm-able world the fleet passed, and new elections were called to fill the 10 vacant slots on the Council.

Alfred tried just as hard as ever to get sensible, practical people elected. And he failed just as badly as ever, even though the pool of famous politicians was running low.

When initial polls made it clear how the election was going to go, Alfred cynically proposed a set of practical tests to be applied to candidates for political office.

They included he following:

Rattlesnake test - put the candidate in a room with a poisonous snake for an hour. If they try to pet it they are disqualified from running for any political office.

Lion test - put them into a divided room with a lion on the other side of a portcullis for an hour - if they try to reach through the bars and shake it's paw, or use the lever to raise the portcullis so they can hug it, they are disqualified. Then repeat the same test with a Cylon instead of a lion.

Extreme test - put them in an empty room for an hour with only a pistol. If they get bored, fidget with the pistol, and somehow shoot themselves, they are disqualified.

Really the "proposed tests" were just a bitter attempt to get folks to realize how bad their candidates had been at recognizing practical realities.

The proposal for tests elicited many laughs, but no change.

But there were some positive results from the coup. The new Councilors came in fearful - recognizing that what had happened to the last Council could happen to them.

More to try to protect themselves from anybody else like Tonc, than for any real motivation to improve government, they approved one of Alfred's proposals.

The proposal was one he'd tried before. It stated that convicted felons could not ever be Councilors, and that Councilors, and candidates for Council, be investigated for any crimes. To aid in those investigations, it also reduced the right to privacy for Councilors and candidates for Council, allowed surveillance of them, and made them subject to greater penalties than normal citizens would get for the same crimes, and further stated that Councilors could not exempt themselves from any laws that applied to other citizens. Lastly, hidden in the legal language of the proposal, it stated that any lie that could be proven to be a lie, and was demonstrably intended to be deceitful and malicious, was, for Councilors, a felony.

Either the Councilors didn't notice, or didn't care. Such a provision could have stopped Tonc, and, if they noticed it at all, they could tell themselves they were smart enough not to get caught.

They passed the proposal.

Alfred had looked into the possibility of making a second proposal - some kind of Council Watcher position which would have only one function - to vote out bad Council members & after casting their nay vote would no longer be Council Watchers, to avoid the possibility of abuse.

But after many hours discussing it with Cecil and others, and they all felt that it couldn't work - there was too much potential for abuse, no matter how they tweaked it. Done one way Council Watchers would be the real power - bullying Councilors into voting the way the Watcher wanted. Done another way, Watchers would themselves be bullied. And if you made them anonymous to try to avoid that, you get into all kinds of difficulties with things like proof of identity, repercussions for votes - since they'd no longer be anonymous, having proved their identity - and similar things.

To be effective, Council watchers would have to pay close attention to what the Council did, and that would take time, raising the issue of motivation - if you pay them too poorly, you encourage them to quickly cast ill-considered votes, in order to get out of the duty. But if you paid them well, they could just sit on the free income forever and never use their votes.

So, since they couldn't solve the problems with the idea, they did not pursue it, though maybe they would still bat the idea around from time to time to see if any improvements came up and made it workable.

º°`°º¤ø¤º°`°º¤ø¤º°`

-Omake-

Or in other words, 'extra', like an outtake or bonus scene.

The sun rose on a scene of contrasts - it showed a nice farm-able world, well-watered and idyllic. There was a nice meadow, with marks in the turf showing a shuttle had recently landed there. There were piles of crates by the marks, where they had been unloaded and left.

But only one crate had been opened - the shovels and other tools in it had been taken out and used as weapons. Just over 30 people had killed each other with them, and their corpses lay undisturbed where they had fallen near the open crate.

Only 2, one of which was in Council robes, had made it away from the landing site - their corpses lay arm-in-arm just outside the meadow. Apparently they had pretended friendship yet simultaneously stabbed each other by surprise.


	16. Chapter 16

Chapter 16

When Alfred arrived at his office the next morning, he was surprised to find the door locked - bolted from the inside so he couldn't get in.

There was a note taped to the doorknob.

It said "Dear Unc, You have been under a lot of stress recently, so Floyd and I are enforcing a vacation day for you. Go have fun. We'll take care of anything important here. Love Sally."

Alfred stood still and thought a moment, then started making calls.

First he called his nephew Nate and made a lunch appointment. Nate was really busy training to be an agricultural expert who could fast-grow all kinds of plants, but he could fit in a lunch with his uncle.

Then he called to arrange a few shuttle flights.

Next he called the prison ship to see about arranging dinner with his friend Croft.

Then he hurried down to the shuttle bay, caught an outgoing shuttle, and spent the morning touring the Park ships.

It was relaxing, and interesting, to walk in the parks. He'd never seen banana trees before, for example.

The park caretakers had arranged nice winding paths, with plenty of screening vegetation, so you could get the feeling of walking alone in nature despite the large numbers of other people there doing the same thing.

He made it to agro ship 2, which was for some inscrutable reason named Ulrich's Blunder, just in time for lunch.

Lunch was somewhat disappointing, since a lot of others invited themselves and took much of the time bending Councilman Pike's ear about their own projects, proposals, and ideas.

Mentally, Alfred shrugged - Nate mostly wanted to talk Girls, Sports, and Agriculture anyway. Alfred had been fearing there may be uncomfortable silences while both searched for things to say, but, with other folks doing so much talking, that difficulty was avoided.

And he did, at least, hear how the agro ship had gotten it's name - a man named Ulrich had quit his job, gone into debt and bought the biggest freighter he could, thinking he could get rich in the shipping business.

But he had no experience in shipping.

So he'd worked very hard trying to make money at it, yet not made much money anyway. He'd barely managed to pay off the ship by the time his wife divorced him. She got the ship in the divorce, renamed it, and tried to sell it. It had sat idle in a field, for sale but with no takers, until the 12 worlds got evacuated.

Once it joined the fleet, it was chosen for refitting as an agricultural ship, since it was so large.

It was a sad story, really.

After lunch, Alfred went to the BattleSphere, toured the tree levels, since they were almost as relaxing as the park ships, then spent the rest of the time before dinner diving in the enormous aquarium that made up Shell 5 near the center of the ship.

Spacesuits, being completely airtight and with their own air supply and breathing arrangements, made effective diving suits. They also had built-in insulation, heaters, and coolers to protect the wearer against the extremes of temperatures in space. As warm as the water was, it wasn't as warm as a human body, so the spacesuit heaters came in handy, though nowhere near their full capacity was needed.

So spacesuits were kept at the aquarium for diving.

Alfred checked one out and dove on in.

He was startled by the wide variety of amazingly vivid colors, in both the reef plants and the fish.

It was entrancing.

The various life forms in the aquarium were carefully managed for maximum growth. While they were very pretty, most were here mainly as food for the humans of the fleet.

When they had scooped up parts of the ocean on Kobol to fill the aquarium, all the predators they'd caught had been eaten by humans. So the other fish, crustaceans, rays, turtles and whatnot had as few natural predators as possible, which helped them grow faster and meant more were available for the ultimate predators - humans.

So huge schools of brightly colored fish all darted around together, in and out of the fanciful yet practical coral structures, which had been fast-grown and guided into complex interesting shapes, which at once fostered fish growth, fish harvesting, and pleased the eye.

Not all the life forms grew fast enough for humans to harvest them. Some grew slow, but were kept around to balance the ecosystem, and some just because they were entertaining to look at.

Alfred was so entertained that the time flew by.

When he left, he brought with him 2 large lobsters he'd caught, then picked up a bunch of shrimp grown in Shell 1, and headed over to the prison barge for dinner.

Having called ahead to make arrangements, he dropped off the shrimp and lobster at the kitchen, then went on to a meeting room to talk with his friend Croft.

Croft was still struggling with bitterness over his unjust imprisonment, and they mostly talked about that before dinner. When the lobster arrived, Croft cheered up significantly, since it was his favorite food.

Alfred left the 2nd lobster on the serving plate and just ate shrimp, of which he'd brought plenty. He liked lobster, but could have it anytime & Croft couldn't.

As Croft ate the second lobster, Alfred got down to business.

"Croft, you have to let your bitterness go. Sure you've been wronged and things should have been better. But, with the destruction of the 12 Colonies, we could all say that. We've all had huge losses. Everybody has plenty to mourn about. There are counselors who can help, but the short form is: let the past go, don't focus on what you've lost. Enjoy whatever you have and try to build something new."

"We don't get counselors in here." Croft mumbled around a mouthful of lobster.

"I'll see if I can change that. They're really busy, but should be able to fit in another group session at least."

Croft shrugged and kept eating.

"In the meantime", Alfred continued, "How much would you like to get out of here?"

"Don't tease me man, I know you tried, but failed to get anywhere concerning a re-hearing."

"That's not what I meant. Yes that failed, but I've been in contact with a lawyer, and there's a loophole I can use. How would you like to be in my custody?"

"What does that mean?" Croft asked warily.

"I means you get out of the prison barge, but are still technically a prisoner - I have to take responsibility for you and keep you escorted at all times. And any problems you cause are treated as entirely my fault, so I'd need your word to be good. But in most ways you'd get your freedom back. I could free your old team the same way."

"No, they're far more bitter than me, so lets see how it works with me first. Then if it's fine, we expand to them one at a time. If we let them all out at once, there will be problems."

"You realize you just agreed?" Alfred grinned.

"Not if it means I just sit in a different cell all the time." Croft grumped.

"Oh no." Alfred responded. "You have way too many skills to just sit you idle somewhere under guard. We can't afford that kind of waste. Though I want to start simple & just have you working with your hands. That's remarkably therapeutic. Then later we can have you use your leadership and organizational skills again. Plus there will be another benefit from working with your hands." Alfred smiled.

"What's that?" Croft asked.

He found out the next day, when he started work in Pod 25, working to finish the heating, cooling and ventilation systems of the Pod. Croft was working alongside the inhabitants of Pod 25, who were mostly former prisoners from Proteus. It can be amazingly therapeutic to realize how much worse than you others have had it.

The prisoners of Proteus had all been jailed for life, for things their ancestors had done - some as much as a thousand years before they were born.

Croft had been unjustly jailed for a couple yahrens, but that was nothing in comparison to the injustice the Proteans had been subjected to.

Yet for some reason, the Proteans were all happy and cheerful sorts of people.

It would take a lot for that attitude to rub off of the expert cynic Croft, but the process was started.

It certainly gave him a new perspective.

After a few days, Croft had no qualms about setting up a schedule to get the other 3 members of his old team freed and run through the same experience, though they would need to start with some professional counseling. And a couple may even need guards - seriously tough guards. Thane and Wolfe could each be very dangerous, and Croft wanted a guard there when he first met with his wife Leda to keep her from doing anything violent before things were explained. They hadn't parted on good terms.

They decided that Leda should be first, after Croft, to be on 'work-release'.

The shuttle carrying Leda to Pod 25 from the Prison ship was still in flight when the next big Cylon attack came.

2 full Cylon Walls - 600 Raiders total, all swept in from the rear of the ragtag fleet in an attempt to overwhelm the defenses there.

There had been ample warning, so 120 of Galactica's 160 Vipers, as well as 96 more from Tenacity and Alfred's ships, were there to meet them.

Tenacity went too, as did the BattleSphere Mousetrap, so its soldiers could help.

Galactica had held back one squadron of 40 Vipers for defense, and it was well that she did. Just as the main group of Vipers got to the rear of the fleet and were about to engage the 600 Cylons there, 375 more Cylons arrived at the front of the fleet by Galactica.

They were able to sneak in close because most of the fleet's sensors were pointed to the rear, at the fight developing there.

The Cylons are good at timing and synchronization.

Galactica fired all 400 of her laser turrets, coordinated by her recently replaced Fire Control Director, so at maximum effectiveness, but it wouldn't have been enough if her 40 Vipers had not swept in and engaged the 375 Cylons in a ridiculously lopsided dogfight and thereby spoiled their aim.

The Cylons mostly attacked Galactica while her 120 Vipers raced back to help her.

When all was said and done at that end of the fleet, Galactica had been hit 866 times before the last 54 Cylons escaped back where they'd come from.

The departure of Galactica's 120 fighters had left the other end of the fleet in a bad situation, so they'd immediately launched everything that might help, including the 8 CORA prototypes, and 80 Training Vipers. Their 125 armed shuttles would have been launched if they had not already been in flight.

As usual and especially since they were so outnumbered, they let the BattleSphere go in first, since it could take an absolutely absurd amount of punishment before taking any real damage.

So the soldiers and other weapons all over the surface of the BattleSphere actually got in the first hits on the Cylons.

That began with the 40 artillery crawlers each launching a full load of the new "mini mines" at the incoming wave of Cylons. These mines had been developed with significant help from Thane, Croft's explosives expert, and this was their first use. Each mini mine was about the size of a human head, and had a blast radius of 10 metrons. Any fighter caught in that blast radius should be destroyed.

The launchers on the artillery crawlers could hold and launch 8 mini mines in place of each small mine. So since each could launch 6 small mines at once, that worked out to 48 mini mines, plus 2 decoys each, that went out from each artillery crawler.

That worked out to 1920 real mines and twice that many decoys.

The Cylons had no trouble shooting down individual mines of any type. But it took a while to shoot down that many. Specifically, it took longer than they had, and 206 mines reached, and destroyed, their targets.

Then the remaining Cylons got in range and shot up the BattleSphere, while its defenders shot back.

And even with most shots missing the erratically dodging Cylons, the combined fire from 750 soldiers, 75 laser tripods, 80 Bantam vehicles, 85 SnowRams, and 40 artillery crawlers took a heavy toll on the Cylons, destroying 157 in the first pass.

The 237 remaining Cylon Raiders faced 106 Vipers, 80 Training Vipers, 8 Recon Viper prototypes, 125 armed shuttles, 8 Liberty Ships each with 6 turrets and a dozen SnowRams acting as mobile turrets, plus LowBoy and the 20 ragtag ships that had been upgraded by that point, plus the 6 more that had been armed but not yet fully upgraded.

Only 16 of those Cylons escaped, and 6 of those were not really Cylons.

Alfred's people had figured out, and prepared, 6 of the captured "ghost" Raiders - the Cylon Raiders with large bombs, about the size of mines - instead of pilots, and launched them at the times when they judged they'd be least likely to be observed launching. The ghost Raiders were meant to be remote-controlled, but could operate according to pre-loaded instructions, and this they did, simply following the real Cylon Raiders back to base and generally acting as if they were real themselves.

Two Cora prototypes followed them at a safe distance, to observe the results and to find the exact location of their Base Stars.

The other 6 Cora Prototypes sped off after the other group of 54 retreating Cylons to find their base.

Neither group of Recon Vipers had any trouble keeping up with the Cylons they were shadowing. Nor did they have any trouble turning away, evading, and then resuming the chase when the Cylons tried to turn and attack them.

The Recon Vipers were so much faster and more maneuverable than the Cylons that the Cylons simply could not catch them or fight them if they didn't allow it.

Earlier, in the big fight, they'd been allowed get involved in the fight, and they'd done very well indeed. But now the information they could gather was of more importance than the Raiders they could kill. The Cylons could manufacture more Raiders easily anyway. But if their bases or Base Stars could be found, they could be evaded or attacked, and either way, they would make a bigger difference than whether 50-odd Raiders survived.

While the Recon Vipers did their job, the regular Vipers landed and refueled and prepared to go out again, and the Training Vipers patrolled.

Adama was not willing, with the Galactica having been heavily damaged, to send off many of his Vipers. But Alfred did manage to talk him into sending 2 squadrons from Galactica, to join the roughly 2 and a half more from the other sources to go counterattack the Base Stars.

Normally, doctrine called for 3 squadrons to attack a Base Star, and even that many often wasn't enough to finish them off before they could escape.

But they launched their 4 and a half squadrons anyway, to go take on a probable 2 Base Stars, because CORA and the ghost Raiders just might make up the difference.

The Vipers started on their way, trailing the smaller group of escaping Raiders to what was probably 2 Base Stars, planning that CORA would get there first & give them information on whatever was actually there, and how much, if any, damage the 6 ghost Raiders did.

Then Viper strike wave could either turn back, or press the attack, depending on what CORA saw.

It turned out that what CORA saw was encouraging - there were only 2 Base Stars which the 10 real Raiders and 6 ghost Raiders were approaching.

The Cylons did not suspect the 6 ghost ships until the first one landed and detonated inside a Base Star.

Cylons are slow to react to surprises, but the positioning of the remaining ghost ships was near the rear of the returning group, and that gave the Cylons just enough time to shoot down all the fighters. They took no chances and shot real and ghost Raiders alike.

The ghost ships, on being fired at, activated their contingent programming and detonated as soon as any valid target was in range.

The first ghost ship, which had detonated inside a Base Star, had gutted it. That Base Star was clearly very damaged and had not managed to fire at Raiders when the other Base Star did.

3 of the remaining 5 ghost ships got shot down, leaving one to detonate near each Base Star.

Both Base Stars had sections of their hulls crumple and rupture.

The already damaged Base Star streamed atmosphere and wreckage out of the new rupture, indicating it had experienced massive internal damage.

The Viper strike wave, watching this in real-time feed from the Recon Viper, accelerated, wishing to attack and finish off the 2 Base Stars as soon as possible.

But it wasn't soon enough.

While they were still approaching, CORA detected another Cylon Base Star approaching the damaged two, and it was already launching fighters to protect them.

If the Viper strike went in, they'd be facing 300 more Raiders, an intact Base Star, a Base Star with what appeared to be moderate damage, and another very heavily damaged Base Star which probably could not fire.

While four and a half squadrons could take on a Base Star and its fighters and win, the presence of the other 2 made it very risky.

Alfred was all for taking the risk - Base Stars took yahrens to build and any which they could kill would significantly reduce the pressure the ragtag fleet was under.

But Adama was in command and called the strike back, saying it was too risky and losses would be too high, especially given the weakened state the Galactica was currently in.

So the Vipers came back and the fleet focused on repairs and assessments.

The Recon Vipers had been a smashing success, both in combat where they carried at least double their weight, and in their planned scouting role. The information both groups had brought back was invaluable.

The fleet changed course slightly to avoid the Cylon base that the larger group of Recon Vipers had found.

And as for the Base Stars, analysis of the film indicated that the heavily damaged Base Star would be down for repairs for at least a yahren, with the more lightly damaged one would probably take a month to repair.

Galactica would need repairs too, and the FRD would be moved up to assist with that. Even still, full repairs could take weeks, during which time they planned to be careful.

The BattleSphere had plenty of materials for repairs, which was good since the 2 unnamed pods Alfred towed along to store extra materials had both been destroyed in the attack. True to form, the Cylons had concentrated on them, since they looked like damaged ships easy to take out.

So Alfred wanted to send out shuttles to collect the bits of the destroyed materials pods so they could be rebuilt and refilled with their spilled materials. But he had the less maneuverable Liberty Ships do that instead - they could just open the front airlock and scoop up bits as they flew along. That way he could send all his shuttles off to collect a nice asteroid they'd spotted.

It wasn't an asteroid they'd normally have collected, since it had few, minerals other than silicon. But that made it even better for the job Alfred had in mind.

While the shuttles were cooperatively dragging back the whole asteroid, Alfred arranged to get from Ron the 3 spare anti-ship missiles he knew Ron had made for Galactica in case she used any and needed reloads.

They would soon build more to replace these, so Galactica would still have spares available.

But, for Alfred's idea, they needed missiles quick, so it was good that they could use these.

What Alfred wanted to do was drill 3 big tubes into the asteroid, suitable to use as launch tubes, set the missiles up to launch from those, disguise it all, and leave it in the path of the Base Stars that were trailing the ragtag fleet.

Anti-ship missiles needed to get close, and the closer they could get the better. But they knew the exact position and course of these Base Stars. And they hadn't changed course even a tiny bit since Recon Vipers had started watching them.

So it seemed like the missiles would have a good chance of getting a hit.

Many kinds of missiles had been developed and tried over the centuries, but most were too easy to shoot down using lasers. By the time you added enough speed, maneuverability, and countermeasures like jamming, decoys and arrays of tiny lasers to blind enemy sensors, so that a missile could get through and hit with a reasonable chance of success, the resulting missile was huge - way too big to be used for anything but shooting Base Stars and other big ships.

But they were pretty effective against ships.

The Galactica normally carried 12 of these, each the size of a large tree.

It didn't take them long to drill and configure the launch tubes, load the missiles in, cover the exit-ends of the tubes with natural rock which would be blasted clear when the missiles fired, and carefully place the asteroid in the path of the Cylon Base Stars, positioned to be close enough to fire, yet not so close they'd bother avoiding it.

The asteroid had no sensors of its own, since those could give it away if the Cylons scanned it. And they did tend to scan things just in case.

Sensors worked both ways - they detected the enemy, but also allowed him to detect you, mainly by sensing your sensor emissions, but if they got close enough, they could also detect the power used to keep sensors on passive mode or standby mode.

With no way to detect the Cylons, the asteroid would be very hard to detect, but it also couldn't fire at them when the time was right - not on it's own.

That's where CORA came in.

The Recon Vipers had maintained a continuous watch over the Base Stars ever since they found them.

The Cylons had, several times, launched Raiders to try to catch and destroy the Recon Vipers, but in these attempts they only wasted time and fuel. The Recon Vipers were just too fast and maneuverable for them to catch - the Cylons couldn't even get close enough to try slim-chance long-distance shots at the Recon Vipers.

So after a while they gave up on trying, and just ignored the Recon Vipers.

So a Recon Viper would be in place to send, when the time was right, the firing signal to the anti-ship missiles on the asteroid.

They waited with great anticipation for the results of the anti-ship asteroid, while they got on with other duties.

Croft's demolition expert Thane had also analyzed the data on the fight, with a focus on the performance of the mini mines, and was working on ideas for those. He wanted to make a version with electromagnetic clamps, and a few simple timing options.

He recognized that the real problem with mines was that they were to easy to shoot down, so he wanted to set up a situation where the Cylons would not have time to shoot them down.

And the Cylons had the least spare time when they were in a dogfight. During dogfights, they were so busy trying to survive, or to hit targets and stay on their tails, that they had no time for anything else.

The electromagnetic clamps would hold the mini mines - it looked like 2 would fit without impairing flight characteristics - on the tail of a Viper, ready for use. The pilot would simply hit a button or issue a voice command to release them in one of 2 ways.

In the first, the mini mine was simply armed and released.

In the second, the mini mine was released, but not armed except for command-controlled detonation.

The first would take out any Cylon on your tail before he could react.

But if the battle was too confused to be sure you would not hit a friendly, you could release the mine to be command-controlled. Then any Recon Vipers flying nearby could detonate it at the right time, when it would damage enemies but not friendlies. CORA had enough computing power, and to spare, so would have no problem with that.

Tests of these worked out well, so they got production going full scale, with the intention of deploying 2 mini mines to the tail of all Vipers of every variation.

Repairs from the last attack were progressing nicely when good news and bad news arrived at about the same time.

The good news was that the asteroid attack had worked. The unsuspecting Base Stars, minus the heavily damaged one which had been towed back the other direction to get repaired, had flown right by the asteroid. It had launched all of its missiles, which had impacted the lightly damaged Base Star and destroyed it.

The trick wasn't likely to work again, but every little bit helped.

CORA had watched as the remaining Cylons blasted the empty asteroid to bits. It couldn't be determined whether they did so in frustration, a sense of revenge, or just to make sure it had no more surprises or wasn't a base. But it did suggest that leaving manned bases behind would be a bad idea.

Not that they'd intended to.

The bad news was that the ragtag fleet was hemmed in on all sides and being herded.

There were 3 Base Stars behind them again, despite one having just been destroyed and another being towed away severely damaged. They were closing in.

To all sides of the ragtag fleet were big Cylon bases which were rapidly being built up.

And in front was a small Cylon base which had the biggest gun anyone had ever seen. Using only a tiny fraction of it's power, it had shot down 2 of the Vipers that had scouted it.

The surviving Vipers had come back with some amazing and almost unbelievable sensor records.

The gun, on what was initially designated Ice Planet Zero, being the first such planet encountered in this sector, was of the Pulsar type, firing pulses of superhot plasma moving in a hyperspace bubble to extreme ranges, then, when the pulse got close enough to a target such that the bubble popped, the pulse still moved at significant fractions of the speed of light.

But while of that type, this gun apparently had none of the usual limitations on that type.

It apparently ignored all energy limits. Its energy was sufficient to destroy any ship in the ragtag fleet, including the Galactica, in a single hit.

Scanners showed it had no energy storage system, so it should not have been able to fire at all. Yet it did.

And it had fired at the scouting Vipers faster than it should have been able to, even if it had had standard energy storage system. The Vipers that had survived, had done so only by getting the planet between them and the Pulsar and keeping it that way until they were beyond range of the planetary sensors, which had a pretty significant range anyway.

Since it seemed able to break all the rules they normally associated with Pulsars, they had to take into account the possibility that it could maintain a quick fire rate too. But even if it couldn't - if it was limited to the 4 shots most pulsars were limited to - they still could not afford to lose Galactica and 2-3 other of the biggest ships in the fleet.

In fact, all data suggested that the human fleet could be hit right now, despite the great distance between it and the gun. All the Cylons needed was good targeting data, which they could get from any fighter or ship they sent to scout.

On learning this, Galactica immediately started aggressive scouting to find and destroy any Cylons before they could get a glimpse of the fleet.

More importantly, they started jamming communications, and instituted a plan of semi-random position changes for all ships, so that if any Cylon did sneak a peek at the ragtag fleet, they couldn't call in its position until they got out of range of the jamming, and the ships would all have changed positions by then.

Adama also started an immediate search for certain highly skilled professionals to go land on the icy planet, climb the mountain the Pulsar was on, attack and defeat any defenders, and blow up the weapon, so the fleet could get past.

There were not many folks in the fleet with the list of skills Adama wanted - cold weather operations, mountain climbing, demolition, and combat.

Lots of folks had some experience or training in one or two of those skills, but few had both experience and training in the whole list.

Croft and his former team - Leda, Thane, and Wolfe, were on the list.

Warriors were sent to the prison barge to collect the 4, only to be told that all but Wolfe were currently on work-release to Councilman Pike, and that Wolfe was scheduled for that soon.

The Warriors collected Wolfe, then flew over to LowBoy to get the other 3.

Counseling had become quite effective over the last few thousand yahrens, but Croft was still as cynical as could be, despite being over most of his bitterness.

He thought it was hilarious that the shuttle full of Warriors stopped just outside the shuttle bay of LowBoy and asked that the 3 nominal prisoners be delivered to them there.

Once the whole deal with strip-searching uninvited armed troops came out, Croft nearly peed himself, he was laughing so hard.


	17. Chapter 17

Chapter 17

Alfred didn't hear any more about the secret military mission until Croft called him from Galactica wanting a favor.

Croft and his team, with a few warriors, had been asked to climb the icy mountain and assault the pulsar on top, as expected, but he felt he would be too exposed up there, and so wanted a diversionary assault.

And Alfred had troops and transports to do such a diversion, in a way that would be survivable for those doing it.

Adama had agreed, and, anticipating that Alfred would agree, had sent on plans for such a diversion.

It would consist of shuttles approaching the planet in such a way as to keep the planet itself in-between themselves and the Pulsar, so it couldn't shoot them. They would then land LandRams and depart while they could - the time window when safe approach could be made was fairly narrow.

Then the LandRams would move to a certain valley specified on the map, and 'make a lot of noise' - basically meaning they would pop up sensor masts, do a lot of active scanning, plus as much live scouting as they safely could, and otherwise make sure to attract the attention of the Cylons.

It was expected that after 'making a lot of noise', the LandRam group would be attacked. Adama suggested that there be unmanned systems, like the tripod lasers, and balloon decoys, in the middle of the valley, but that most of the vehicles and other guns be kept close to the ridge over which the Cylons were likely to fly in their approach. Since the guns on Cylon Raiders pointed forwards - straight and level - by the time they could see the forces waiting next to the ridge, they would no longer be able to shoot them until they flew past and turned around. The ridge would be in the way and prevent any strafing, until they turned and came back. And if enough guns were brought, there would not be any Cylons left to turn, come back, and strafe. They couldn't maneuver sharply enough, in atmosphere, and that close to the ground, to prevent most shots fired at them from hitting. In space they were quite hard to hit, but not so much near a planet's surface.

Lastly Adama's plan called for the LandRam force to advance in a leisurely manner towards the mountain with the pulsar on top and the Cylon base at its foot. It was expected they wouldn't be strafed again, but if it looked like they may be - if the Cylons had more fighters and launched them, the LandRam force had a list of other valleys they were to go to to try the same kind of fight as before.

It was not planned for the LandRam force to actually get to, and assault, the Cylon base or the Pulsar - just approach, to grab and hold their attention, so that the mountain climbing group, led by either Apollo or Croft depending on who you asked, did not get shot off the mountainside.

Alfred was glad to receive the request, and just as glad to plan an all-out effort while still letting Adama think it was just a diversion - Adama tended to only trust war to Warriors.

Alfred had already been mobilizing his forces and looking for an excuse to go to the planet, but planning to go whether he found a good excuse or not. The way he saw it, when the entire human race is at risk of imminent annihilation, you do not send a dozen experts to take on the problem while everyone else sits idle.

Instead, when everybody is at risk, you send the biggest fraction of everybody that you can - as many as can possibly make a difference.

Sure, it was very common in their society to assume everything should be handled by the best experts available. And sometimes that was the right choice. But it was possible to take it too far - you didn't want to ignore someone who was bleeding after an accident just because you were not a trained doctor - first aid was one of those things that needed to be done by whomever happened to be available, since it was urgent.

So too, was saving the human race from annihilation - everybody who could help, needed to, rather than just waiting for a few highly trained experts.

The societal attitude of "Warriors can do everything, and everything is for experts to do", which Adama unfortunately shared, put all their eggs in one basket, so to speak, where one setback could doom them all.

So part of Alfred wanted to send every human in the fleet down to the planet, to give them the maximum possible chance for survival of the race despite any setbacks that may occur.

But there were limitations.

You can't defeat a Cylon by punching him, so there would be no point in sending more people than weapons. And they had far fewer weapons than people.

And neither would it be any use to send more people than they could keep alive despite the cold - folks who get frozen to death within centons of landing on the planet could not help win the fight.

Also, people can't flap their arms and fly to the planet. So you can't send more than you can fit in shuttles.

And while most ships in the fleet could land on planets, none but Tenacity and Galactica were fast enough to get there in the narrow time window they had while the planet's rotation pointed the Pulsar away from them.

But Galactica was too big to land on planets, while Tenacity was needed with the fleet. It had the speed and guns to hunt down Cylon patrols, and the communications gear to jam their transmissions so they couldn't just call in its position and get it destroyed by the Pulsar.

With Tenacity's efforts, and those of Galactica's Vipers, all doing aggressive patrols to destroy any Cylon fighters acting as spotters, the fleet could sit still a while without the Pulsar destroying them.

But if the fleet sat still more than about 11 hours, the Cylon Base Stars would get close enough to attack. And while their attack would be bad enough, their combined efforts could easily punch through any jamming, send targeting coordinates to the Pulsar, and have it wipe out the human fleet.

So there was a very specific time limit on operations, and they must succeed or all the humans were doomed.

The main limiter for Alfred's force would be ways to keep from freezing to death. This mostly came down to how many spacesuits and vehicles they had, and could transport, because almost nobody in the fleet had any cold-weather gear.

Most didn't even have a second set of clothes.

Alfred's factories were turning out some cloth - just enough to keep people clothed so far. But it was all Rayon which, despite it's many favorable properties generally, had no value at all as insulation. On board ships that wasn't a problem. But it meant that no amount of Rayon would do much to keep you warm on the planet.

The other big limiter on the size of Alfred's 'diversion' force would be shuttles.

He had only 125 of them, plus 2 that Tenacity would loan him and 2 more loaned from Hephaestus.

Galactica had more which it could loan, but didn't feel they were needed for a diversionary force, so they were withheld.

So 129 shuttles would launch as soon as the time window for that opened - as soon as the planet's rotation gave them an opportunity to approach without being shot.

109 of those shuttles would be carrying one SnowRam each, mostly gathered from the Liberty Ships, with a couple contributed by the BattleSphere.

The other 20 shuttles would be carrying 4 Bantam light scout vehicles each.

And all the shuttles would be loaded with people.

Alfred had 750 trained soldiers, and 100 more - 2 more platoons - partially trained.

You wouldn't normally want to risk partially trained soldiers in battle, but this was an exception.

They, plus 100 more Borellian No-Men from Tenacity, all had armored spacesuits, and spacesuits, inherently, had heaters that could cope with anything. As cold as planets could get, they didn't get as cold as space often did.

Alfred's people were able to scrounge another 166 space suits from the aquarium in the BattleSphere, and from various ships.

The shuttles could carry a dozen people plus vehicles. And they were going to fill the vehicles with people too. Normally you wouldn't, but for an event of such importance, you didn't stress over whether some passengers in cargo space had a rough flight.

A shuttle normally carried 12 passengers and a LandRam or SnowRam. You could put 12 more people in that SnowRam. Or, instead of a SnowRam, a shuttle could carry 4 Bantams, each with 4 people in it.

If you left the SnowRam behind, then the shuttle could carry 50 people. But they needed the SnowRams - any shuttle flying near the Pulsar and Cylon base would die, so they had to send SnowRams to travel overland, to have any chance of arriving at the target ok.

The shuttles' combined capacity was 3176 people between them, plus the SnowRams and Bantams.

That, obviously, was considerably more than the 950 trained and partially trained soldiers they had.

So they called for volunteers, and accepted 1740 who knew how to aim and fire a weapon. Some of them also knew how to build things.

That left them with lift capacity in the shuttles for another 486 people, but they filled it with equipment instead of people - they had enough volunteers to fill the space, but did not have enough ways to keep them from freezing to death.

The Bantams, being open-topped vehicles, could really only be used by folks in spacesuits. Their spacesuits would keep them plenty warm, and wouldn't run low on power to do so, since they could plug in to, and get power from, the vehicle. The vehicle, being fusion powered, had only to toss some of the ubiquitous snow into the intake hopper on the fusion energizer, to get more energy. So they effectively had unlimited energy.

The SnowRams, similarly, had unlimited energy and could crank up their internal heaters as much as they wished. So non-spacesuited folks riding in those would not freeze to death - even firing their weapons out of the gun-ports on the sides would only chill them a bit - some cold air would blow in, meet the heaters, and be turned into warm air. The cold breezes could be uncomfortable, but being uncomfortable was part of war, and certainly better than being annihilated.

But if SnowRams failed due to battle damage - other kinds of failure were very rare - there would be a problem. If each SnowRam was filled with only volunteers without spacesuits, any disabled vehicle would mean death for all passengers as well.

So they spent some time thinking about that, and ended with a workable solution - mixing some spacesuited folks in among the rest on the SnowRams, to deal with emergencies.

Alfred's 129 fully loaded shuttles, escorted by 106 Vipers, flew down to the planet as soon as they could.

Galactica's one shuttle with their team of experts followed them.

Such a force was impossible to miss. So of course the Cylons attacked it.

They sent up a full wall of 300 Raiders.

The Vipers engaged those, and the Cylons became fully entangled with them. The two fighter forces flew through each other, firing as they passed but dodging even more.

Normally such passes resulted in few hits, and this time there were none - the humans were concentrating entirely on dodging.

After that first pass, it was standard procedure to turn and maneuver in dogfights, and both sides began to do so. But first 58 Cylon Raiders exploded, having hit mini-mines released by Vipers as the 2 groups passed. It would have been more, but not enough mini-mines had yet been manufactured for all Vipers to carry a pair each. Then 91 more Raiders got shot by the rear-firing laser rifles mounted on the Vipers. Only 19 of those 91 had catastrophic failures and exploded. 67 more were mostly intact physically, but out of the fight with varying degrees of incapacity, and 5 Raiders took laser rifle hits that left them still able to fight, though 4 of those were rapidly losing fuel from big holes in the fuel tanks inside their wings.

The dogfight after that had better odds for the vipers than most fights. Viper pilots were used to facing 3 to 1 odds and winning. But, by the time the maneuvering began, the 106 Vipers faced only 156 Raiders.

Still, the dogfight between Vipers and Raiders took long enough that the Vipers had to turn back to the fleet once they'd beaten the Cylons.

Only 33 Cylons escaped, and only because to pursue them would bring the Vipers into the firing arc of the pulsar, which had already demonstrated that it had no trouble shooting down Vipers.

While that was going on, the Cylons had been too busy to bother with the shuttles, which flew on towards the planet unmolested, firing at the Cylon Raiders while they could.

Soon, the shuttles had arrived at the planet. They flew low along its surface as far as they safely could, to spots previously selected, then landed and disgorged troops and vehicles.

All but a dozen then hurried back to the fleet, to be ready to bring in a second wave of vehicles and volunteers once the next time window opened in 6 hours.

Galactica's shuttle with Croft's team went to a different spot on the planet, so they could do a stealthy approach while Alfred's group attracted any Cylon attention.

Alfred's troops quickly rushed to their various assignments.

320 soldiers in spacesuits climbed aboard the 80 Bantam scout vehicles and raced ahead. They were capable of twice the speed that SnowRams could reach. So this would be a mobile force whose purpose was to get to places where the Cylons didn't expect them to be, then make surprise attacks and ambushes.

Instead of carrying the tripod laser heavy weapons in the Bantams, in place of a passenger, as usual, they dragged them behind on improvised skis to make more room for passengers.

Following them were the 109 SnowRams, each loaded full of people. Most of those were volunteers without spacesuits, though 166 of them had the miscellaneous suits which had been scrounged. They looked like a motley group - some of the scrounged suits were painted in bright colors or outlandish styles according to their owner's preferences. And most of the suits that had come from the aquarium were painted to resemble large fish or merfolk.

But whatever they looked like, they would protect the wearers from cold.

30 soldiers, with spacesuits, were also aboard the SnowRams. They were trained & so would act as leaders for that force.

The 196 people with spacesuits were distributed among the 109 SnowRams, with the thought that when any SnowRam got hit, nearby SnowRams could disgorge enough spacesuited figures to quickly recover the non-suited figures from the damaged SnowRams and bring them to safety in intact SnowRams, which would have room for them because some spacesuited folks would thereafter ride on the roof instead of inside.

600 spacesuit equipped soldiers - 50 crammed into each of the 12 shuttles that stayed behind - waited for their opportunity to attack directly from the shuttles.

It was not currently possible to approach the Cylon base while flying. While the Pulsar couldn't point low enough to hit shuttles skimming the ground, the Cylon base had significant anti-air defenses which could slaughter shuttles in droves.

So those defenses needed to be taken out before the shuttles could go in, flying as low as they could, and assault the Pulsar on the mountain.

In the meantime, those 600 soldiers took advantage of their spacesuits and worked with the 462 other volunteers - the ones who had no spacesuits and wouldn't fit in the SnowRams - using the equipment the shuttles had also delivered, which included several types of machines, and lots of fusion energizers and heaters.

They'd all been dropped at the mouth of a cave system which scanners had detected, and which was conveniently located near the Pulsar's mountain, but protected by a ridge from any Cylon fire.

The plan was to use the caves to build a quick and simple base to support their operations on the planet. Something as simple as putting doors on the cave mouths and heating the interior would be useful, but they didn't need to stop at that.

Even a simple base would have a few purposes, but mainly it would be another avenue of attack if the main assault failed.

Alfred liked having back-up plans on an issue as important as this.

The first assault was their best - it included all the soldiers they had, with all the best equipment. They wanted that one to succeed, so they gave it every chance they could.

But if for any reason it failed, they had follow-on assaults planned too - each with as good a chance of success as they could arrange.

The second assault, if it came to that, would be shuttles coming from the fleet, and carrying SnowRams again. All of Alfred's production was busy making spacesuits, weapons, and other equipment for that assault. They only had 6 hours before the next attack window opened, but they were using it as best they could. That attack would land at the temporary base, let out many of its people into the heated rooms there, then send on fully-manned SnowRams to attack the Cylon base.

If the first two failed, the third assault would come from the simple base in the caves, and be made up of people the first and second waves of shuttles had brought, moving through a heated tunnel they would build.

The fourth assault, was a desperation move to be used only if all else failed. At that point there wouldn't be time for any finesse - they'd just send all the Vipers and all the armed shuttles, to come in simultaneously from different directions and attack the Pulsar. They knew it could fire fast - this attack would find out how fast they could change the direction the Pulsar was pointing in. They were certain to lose fighters and shuttles if they attacked that way, but at that point there would be no good options left - they'd lose everybody if they did nothing. And of course before you just gave up and lost everybody, you'd try other things, even if they were sure to take losses - even serious losses.

When they had first thought of it, the temporary base was just intended to be support. It would provide hospital facilities for any who got wounded or hypothermia. People operate much better when they know such support is available.

Then the idea grew.

The base could also make light repairs on vehicles, perhaps getting some back into the fight.

Additionally, the base could mount some defenses to help protect the landing field for the 2nd wave, and to snipe at any Cylon Raiders that may pass by. Alfred's ships had had 10 completed laser turrets which had not yet been mounted on any ship. These got small sensor clusters mounted on top, and then had been sent down with the first wave. The base workers - the 600 spacesuited soldiers, the 462 without spacesuits, and the 11 simple labor robots they'd found among the ships of the fleet and sent - would be working on mounting the turrets just behind the ridge, on stands which could raise to fire over the ridge, or lower to hide behind the ridge.

It should be something they could finish before the 600 soldiers needed to leave for their attack.

They had also sent equipment to make emergency spacesuits. These were basically simple bubbles, with cylinders for the arms and legs, and attachments for heaters and air supplies. They were awkward to work in, but they'd keep you alive in an emergency. Nobody used them anymore, since modern spaceships almost never lost atmospheric pressure. But the design existed and could help in this situation, so Alfred's folks had built and sent a couple machines to make them, plus over a thousand pounds of polymers to make them out of. These polymers were themselves good insulators, but they'd be augmented by heaters which had also been sent.

The 462 workers at the base without spacesuits would keep the machines busy making emergency spacesuits for the 2nd and third wave assaults, so they'd have at least some ability to operate outside their vehicles at need.

But most of the workers' time would be spent on the assault tunnel, as they were calling it.

This was actually just a long thin igloo, made of the plentiful snow and ice.

To build it, they had 3 simple carts holding continuous extrusion machines. These could extrude walls of ice a metron thick and 2 metrons tall, and a roof over them of similar dimensions. So the resulting ice tunnel would be a simple hallway, tall enough for a man to walk down, and wide enough for 2 or 3 to walk abreast.

The carts were pushed along by simple labor robots, while the continuous extrusion machines took in snow and ice from in front of them, and left walls and a roof behind them.

The intakes of the continuous extrusion machines were fed by the same kind of grinder they used to break up comets which shuttles brought back to the fleet. It had counter-rotating drums studded with sharp blades, which by their rotation, pulled the machine into the work surface and spat ground-up bits out the output tube.

The grinders were strong enough to grind ice easily. It took them a little longer to grind up any rocks they encountered, but they were very capable of grinding them too. They spit the ground-up bits out a waste output tube.

The robots would work all these machines, and progress at about a walking pace. They would be supervised by humans in emergency spacesuits if needed, to make a continuous tunnel from the temporary base in the cave, all the way to the part of the Cylon base built into the bottom of the same mountain the Pulsar was on top of. They planned to tunnel to and into the mountain, tunnel out a staging room, fill it with people ready to attack, then tunnel from there into the underground rooms of the Cylon base.

Then the fight would be on.

It was a way to get folks into the fight who were not otherwise protected from the cold.

They could go from the heated temporary base, thru the ice tunnel, to the heated staging room and the Cylon underground rooms, which were also heated.

The ice tunnel would be cold, but it could be heated too, either to a comfortable temperature if you didn't mind it slowly melting over the span of a couple days, or to 31 degrees which, while very uncomfortable in the short term and not something you could endure long term, was certainly better than dying in about 3 centons, as would be the case with unprotected folks on the surface.

But they could still do better than that. Rather than have unprotected people walk along the tunnel, they'd come up with a faster and warmer way to transport them. They would make simple ceramic boxes out of available silicon rocks, put them on skis, heat them, and have high-speed powered winches at each end of the tunnel pull them back and forth, taking a string of several boxes, each with about 20 people inside, in each trip.

The people from the second wave might be able to walk the length of the tunnel in the approximately 5 hours they would have, but they would certainly get there much faster, and stay warmer, in the lines of boxes, which some folks were already calling "trains".

But all that was really for just in case the first assault failed for some reason.

While the 462 volunteers, assisted by the 600 soldiers and 11 simple labor robots were just beginning their work, using laser drills and continuous formers to form and seal a big heated chamber to start with, the first assault went in.

The 80 Bantams had raced forward and occupied a good ambush position behind some steep hills, from which they could shoot at any Cylons attacking the slower-moving SnowRams.

There they waited a bit, while using small thin sensor masts, just barely poking up above the hills, to monitor the Cylon base, map out its buildings and determine what each was used for. When the time came to attack, they would use this information for targeting priorities - there was no value in blasting storage sheds, but quite a bit of value in blasting their command center, for example.

But they did not get to finish their information-gathering attempt. As soon as they raised the sensor masts, they saw that the Cylons were about to launch Raiders. They had obviously pulled a spare squadron out of storage and were in the final preparation stages for launching them. The storage crates they had been kept in had been hastily shoved to the side of the landing field, and the maintenance techs who had assembled them were just beginning to pack their tools and walk away, while pilots hurried toward the now-ready fighters.

The Bantam force called this information back to the SnowRams, and both got ready to fight.

It would have been nice if they could just shoot the Raiders before they launched, but to pop up above the hill so they could fire lasers, which required line-of-sight, would have been suicide at the hands of the base defenses.

The only way they had of attacking without line-of-sight was their steam projectors launching grenades. And these had been packed away among other equipment, since they had not expected to need them yet.

Before they could get them out, the Cylons launched.

Though the grenades for the steam projectors were not ready, the rest of their weapons were.

The 75 Cylon Raiders flew towards the distant SnowRam force...straight over the waiting Bantams, who knew, due to their sensor masts, exactly when the Cylons would pass by.

All 320 soldiers of the Bantam force had spread out - spaced evenly along a long line at the base of the hill such that any Raider flying over them would pass directly over at least one soldier - and at the signal from the commander, all turned their laser rifles straight up and fired continuous beams.

Every single one of the Cylon Raiders was hit.

Four exploded, 55 more crashed immediately, and the remaining 16 staggered but kept flying - barely. To avoid hitting the ground in their impaired condition, the 16 headed straight up.

This made them easy targets for the independent tripod lasers, and also the pintle-mounted lasers on the Bantams, all of which could, and did, aim and fire themselves with only verbal orders from humans. They were not as effective without human operators, but they were effective enough for this. The 155 guns had no trouble shooting down the 16 damaged fighters.

Then the Bantam force hurried to pack up and move to a different position.

Ambushes only worked once, and the Cylons still had a significant ground force.

And the closer they could get, the better their sensor data would be, which would help their attacks go better.

So they drove, staying behind cover the whole way, to another pre-selected site in a ravine, much close to the Cylon base.

Then they deployed the small thin sensor masts again and started collecting observation data.

One Bantam lagged well behind, in order to try their small flying drones. They were not sure if the little things would be detected and shot down by the Cylons or not, and they didn't want the attempt to give away the new position of the Bantam force.

The first 2 drones launched fine, but got shot down immediately.

For the third drone, they tried throwing it into the air, with all its systems set on passive.

That worked.

It did not get shot down, and did achieve a height of 4 metrons, which was just enough to peek above the hill before gliding back down to a landing.

That gave them some data, but not much.

They tried again, this time launching the drone, not under its own power, but by putting it in the steam projector on a pintle-mounted heavy laser. That one got shattered by the power of the launch.

Their last drone, they managed to prop on top of the steam projector of a laser rifle. This launched fine, and got good imagery of the Cylon base, using only its passive systems as it glided back down.

With their tests completed, that Bantam and its crew re-joined the Bantam force.

The data-gathering mission of Bantam force was almost done, meaning it was almost time to attack, when a big Cylon freighter arrived and landed on their base's landing field.

It was easy to detect that the freighter was armed, so the Bantams held their fire until it landed. Generally a ship about to make a landing dedicates their sensors to detecting wind currents and obstacles and otherwise helping them land without problems. So the freighter did not see, or at least did not react to, the Bantams.

And it would likely have been pointless to shoot the freighter anyway - the Bantams and Tripod lasers could destroy a Raider in a single hit, but an armed freighter was a military freighter, and may very well have had thick armor and forcefields able to shrug off any hits the Bantam force could deliver. If so, it could easily shoot them back from such a high angle that their ravine would give them no cover.

It might not have had armor or forcefields, but the risk wasn't worth it.

So instead of shooting it and possibly dooming themselves and the whole mission thereby, they hid, watched, and fed all their observation data back to the SnowRam force and to their temporary base.

At the temporary base, all 10 laser turrets got ready to pop up and fire on command.

The SnowRam force continued moving towards the Cylon base, at the highest speed they could while staying in cover.

They were almost to the planned attack position anyway.

The Bantam force spread out a bit, readied all their weapons, and watched.

The Cylon freighter finished landing, then immediately opened its cargo bay doors.

Machinery unloaded the first 2 Cylon fighters from its hold, and cycled back to get the next two.

Cylon pilots hurried from their barracks towards the new fighters.

Unlike normal, these fighters were already unpacked and ready to fly.

The freighter, G series number 12, was a design that could hold 600 Raiders all crated up for maximum shipping efficiency, or 300 uncrated and ready to fly. From it's arrival vector, it was a good bet that they'd delivered 300 to one of the nearby Cylon bases.

Those bases were keeping the Ragtag fleet hemmed in, so they couldn't just leave the area - if they tried, they'd be pinpointed for fire from the planetary pulsar.

After the freighter had delivered half their fighters, they'd apparently unpacked the other half so they could be used more quickly.

So it looked like 300 new Cylon fighters would be able to launch and fight as soon as automatic machinery could unload them and pilots could get to them.

That couldn't be allowed.

Borellian No-Men, there as part of Bantam force, pulled out their energy bolas and took careful aim. Each bola could fly any distance on its own power - though not terribly fast - to impact unerringly on any target whose image had been fixed in its memory.

It took a moment to focus them on the target and fix the image, but once that had been done, they would hit every time.

The range to the Cylon base was still such that accurate fire was difficult. Lasers moved straight and fast & so they hit exactly what you aimed at. But aiming precisely was not so easy when even the minor errors introduced by your own breathing could make you miss entirely.

The energy bolas did not have that problem.

Cylon pilots hurried out in groups of three towards the new Raiders.

Borellians, in groups of three, launched energy bolas at them.

And Cylon pilots died in groups of three, until they stopped hurrying across the landing field towards the fighters and instead took cover in buildings.

Meanwhile, at the temporary base that Alfred's folks had been setting up, the 10 laser turrets had popped up and fired at the Cylon freighter. It didn't take many hits to neutralize it.

As soon as it was clear that the freighter was disabled, the turrets switched targets to the Cylon base defenses, which were beginning to shoot back.

The SnowRam force hurried on.

And the rest of Bantam Force opened fire. Their tripod lasers and pintle-mounted lasers peeked above the hilltop, shooting base defenses first, then Cylons, then important buildings.

The Cylon base defenses, confused between two sets of targets, fired at both the 10 distant laser turrets and at the nearby forest of heavy guns from Bantam Force. Cylons don't react very well when surprised, so their aim was not very good, but they still got hits.

By the time all of the Cylon base's defenses were silenced, 7 of the 10 laser turrets at the human's temporary base were destroyed, as were 19 of the tripod lasers and 13 of the pintle-mounts.

Since only the pintle-mounted guns, and not the Bantams themselves, were exposed above the hilltop, those Bantams survived, though with varying degrees of damage.

Cylon foot soldiers moved forwards, keeping to cover in dips and ravines, and behind hills, buildings, and ridges so lasers couldn't hit them.

It would have been easy to fly the human shuttles overhead and strafe the Cylons, but some base defenses survived on the other side of the Cylon base. Those were shielded from Bantam Force's lasers by the mountain itself, but would have no trouble shooting down shuttles.

So they used neither shuttles nor lasers.

Bantam force launched 300 of their 317 remaining drones, to keep an eye on the 2000+ advancing Cylons, and to launch 600 Solenite darts at them.

Then they used that targeting data to attack with indirect fire. They loaded Solenite grenades into their steam launchers, and fired at every group of Cylons they could find.

It is difficult to hit with indirect fire in any case, the range was long, and the soldiers had not had much chance to practice with these weapons. On the other hand, the Cylons had to stay in cover if they didn't want to be hit by the laser fire from the remaining heavy weapons. Since there wasn't a vast amount of cover, they had to bunch up. And bunched-up targets are perfect for weapons like grenades.

So the Solenite grenades arced up, over, and down, while the Solenite darts glided in from the drones that had launched them.

Most missed. Though even a miss caused a blast that could shove a Cylon out of cover, to be hit by the waiting lasers.

And the darts and grenades which hit - especially the grenades - caused great destruction among the Cylons.

The soldiers fired until they ran out of grenades, then they fired Solenite darts, in packs of 9, as well as individual guided darts.

They were about to run out of those when SnowRam force arrived and attacked.

The 109 heavy guns on top on the SnowRams, backed up by 1308 people, mostly volunteers, firing out the side gun-ports, made short work of the remaining Cylons, who were huddled in small clusters which could not support each-other, and so were easily overwhelmed.

The SnowRams swept through the base as far as was safe to do, then spacesuited figured emerged from each and stormed the remaining Cylon base defenses. Not being set up to defend against infantry, those were quickly captured, though not without significant losses among the humans' decoy balloons, which were sent in doors and around corners first.

The typical approach was to inflate a lifelike decoy balloon - one of the ones tethered to the waist and extending to the side of the body at about a 45 degree angle - then lean around the corner and shoot any defender you see. Since the balloon went around the corner first, any defender waiting to shoot, shot the balloon, & then was shot by the attacker coming just behind the balloon.

In other cases, a free-floating self-mobile lifelike decoy balloon "blimp" was inflated and sent, a short distance away from the actual attacker. The 'blimp', staying behind cover most of the time, was sent out of cover a moment before the attacker came out of cover nearby. Any defenders would have their attention diverted to the blimp at the crucial moment, missing their chance to fire before being fired upon.

So the balloons got shot up badly in the assault, but they did their job by taking hits instead of humans.

Some armored spacesuits took hits too, and several SnowRams took some damage, but no humans were seriously injured nor died.

While that was going on, Bantam force had raced right up to the entrance of the underground part of the Cylon base and begun their assault of that, so they could capture the elevator to the top of the mountain and use it to assault the Pulsar.

They were making good progress with that when the last few Cylons at the Cylon above-ground base were defeated.

The moment the Cylon above-ground base was in their hands, the 12 shuttles back at the humans' temporary base, with their load of 600 more soldiers, swept in and attacked the mountaintop.

The mountaintop had a small narrow landing strip on top, with a tunnel leading from there into the 3 rooms servicing the Pulsar itself. But variable high winds made it too dangerous to try to land a shuttle there without help from the control tower, which the Cylons still controlled.

But that wouldn't stop the human soldiers.

Rudel, the former stunt pilot, had volunteered to fly the first shuttle in. He flew his shuttle full of soldiers to a point about 3 metrons above, and 100 metrons to the side of the mountaintop landing strip. There he had room, and therefore time, to correct for winds before they could cause him to hit anything.

Then soldiers opened the door to his shuttle, and fired 'harpoons' at the side of the mountain, aimed just above the surface of the landing strip. These were simple coils of cable, with a 'harpoon tip' made of the same kind of special molecular-binding pitons that the Apollo/Croft team was currently using to climb the mountain. You simply set them for the right kind of material - in this case rock - and pushed them in. They entered smoothly and then held quite against quite a bit of force.

So 4 harpoons flew out, and 3 hit, and bound to, useful spots on the mountain wall. One fell too low, so was jettisoned.

This left 3 cables running from the shuttle, down a slight angle, to the wall of the mountain about where the tunnel left the landing strip to enter the Pulsar-support rooms.

The 50 soldiers onboard then simply clipped their harnesses to the cables, walked out the shuttle door, and slid down to the landing strip.

Only two of them had special training in anything like that, but you didn't need special training when you had the right equipment. All 50 arrived safe and sound, then commenced an attack down the tunnel and into that part of the Cylon base.

Rudel, having proved it was possible, then cleared the way for the next shuttle to do the same as he had just done, while calling them with a few pointers - things he'd noticed about the winds and how best to correct for them.

The soldiers assaulting from the landing strip were making progress when the first elevator-load of soldiers arrived from the bottom of the mountain.

These had brought with them some large metal plates, into which firing loopholes had been cut.

So when the elevator arrived and Cylon laser fire immediately flew into the opening elevator door, nobody died. Rather, their metal plates got badly chewed up and pushed backwards a bit on their skids, while the soldiers shot Cylons.

The Cylons, now being assaulted simultaneously from their front and back, didn't last long.

Alfred's troops had captured the whole Cylon base, and the intact planetary Pulsar weapon.

They wasted no time contacting the ragtag fleet and telling them it was clear to come ahead.

Nobody wanted the Cylon Base Stars to get any closer to the fleet.

Then they called for the temporary base to send forward some builders to examine the Pulsar and look at how to disassemble it so it could be taken with the fleet for study and possible replication.

That call was barely completed when a flustered Apollo, and a cynically satisfied Croft, and their team, finished their climb of the mountain and entered the room with the Pulsar.

Their plan had been to set explosives and demolish it.

Alfred wanted it captured, since it represented a huge potential to defend themselves, and he had prepared for this eventuality.

His troops simply presented Apollo with a document, prepared by Cecil the lawyer, claiming ownership of the Pulsar by right of salvage, and pointing out that combat was over and Apollo had no legal authority to destroy private property in non-combat situations.

It also pointed out that the Pulsar, having been captured, was now no threat to the human fleet, which had been the whole goal of the plan to blow it up.

So, their mission was accomplished even though the Pulsar had not been blown up.

It still looked like Apollo intended to press the issue, but he was interrupted by a call from Starbuck, who had been with Apollo's team but left at the base of the mountain to do what he could there.

Starbuck had been busy and had a number of important messages to pass on.

He was in contact with a person named Doctor Ravashol who claimed to have invented the Pulsar and wanted various assurances, including, most urgently, that his village full of human clones not be attacked.

Cease-fire messages were sent out, assurances were given, plans for assaults 2 through 4 were canceled, meetings were arranged and held, and many revelations were made.


	18. Chapter 18

Chapter 18

It was a busy and confusing time, during which it came out that this planet, which was named Tairac, had been a private research laboratory run by Doctor Ravashol and a few colleagues, before the Cylons arrived and took over.

Ravashol had developed cloning technology and generated a whole village of clones, which had been working for the Doctor and his colleagues on various building projects, including the Pulsar.

Ravashol called the Pulsar the Massive Unlimited Planetary Pulsar and Everything Terminator, or MUPPET for short. He said he had had plans to build at least two of them to defend Tairac, but had completed only one, which he'd nicknamed Sweetums, before the Cylons arrived. By chance, the Cylons had arrived when planetary rotation pointed Sweetums away from them, so it was unable to shoot them down.

The Cylons had recognized Sweetums as a weapon, despite Dr. Ravashol's cover story that it was actually a long-range communication device. They had demanded that the technology be handed over, but there they were frustrated - there were no notes or plans that they could find, the scientists were unwilling to talk, and the device itself could not be examined since the scientists insisted that to do so would detonate it and the whole mountain it was on.

So the Cylons had tried to charm the information out of the scientists, by letting them and the clones continue their work unmolested while trying to chip away at their resistance.

They were not very good at charm, but they at realized that, if charm were ever to work, it had to be tried before other measures, such as torture, were tried.

Ravashol and the others had tried to string the Cylons along, handing over various tidbits of information which appeared helpful, but actually weren't.

The efforts to charm the humans stopped, and the torture began, when a Cylon scientist arrived and started looking over the material.

Then Doctor Ravashol's colleagues were taken, one by one, into the Cylon base for questioning.

None ever returned.

Ravashol himself had expected to die similarly, but the Cylons kept him around. They realized that they could not get any information from the dead, so they had to keep at least one scientist alive and try to figure ways to coax the information out of him. They began by expanding the research facilities and supplying Ravashol with equipment, in hopes he could be 'bought' that way.

In the meantime, Ravashol had installed several booby traps into the Pulsar, to discourage any Cylon attempts to investigate it for themselves. Those had worked, destroying 3 groups of Cylons attempting to investigate, and buying Ravashol more time.

But while he had kept the technology from them, he had not been able to keep secret the simple operation of the machine. So the Cylons had been prepared to use it against the human fleet when the opportunity arose.

Ravashol was glad that he and the clones had been rescued. He didn't hold any illusions that they would have been spared indefinitely.

So he was grateful for the destruction of the Cylons on the planet, but not so grateful that he was willing to give up what he saw as a good bargaining position - several Cylon Base Stars were chasing the ragtag fleet as it approached Tairac.

Ravashol offered to shoot down the Base Stars, but in return he wanted help building more MUPPETS, plus anti-fighter defenses and some infrastructure. He wanted his planet to be safe from further attacks.

He said that the MUPPET could destroy any ship in a single hit and maintain a fire rate slightly faster than a laser turret, with no limits other than possibly running out of fuel, because of his unique solution to the energy problem most pulsars faced.

Most pulsars had to use big banks of energy storage, which they emptied in 4 or 5 shots. Ravashol's MUPPET Pulsar instead used direct conversion of tylium for its energy.

Tylium was a unique fuel. Most fuels stored energy in their chemical or molecular bonds, or, for fusion or fission fuels, in the arrangement of their atoms. Tylium did store some energy in its chemical bonds & that was highly volatile. But that was a side-show, at best, to its real use.

It's real use came in catalyzing zero-point energy. More or less. It wasn't a true catalyst because it was used up in the process. But people didn't bother too much about that point and called it a catalyst anyway.

Zero-point energy was, in simple terms, a vast uncharted sea of pure energy in a parallel dimension. Apparently the whole dimension was nothing but energy. And tylium, in the right support machinery, acted as a gateway for energy to come from that dimension to this one.

A lot of the details of that machinery were involved in controlling the rate you wanted the energy to arrive at, and the total energy you wanted.

And the amount of energy which tylium could deliver varied depending on the precision and design of the support machinery, and with what rate and totals that machinery was set for. If you set the machinery to deliver more energy than it could handle, it blew up.

Doctor Ravashol had invented machinery that could deliver vast amounts of zero-point energy, as long as it was all done, and passed on to something that could use it, instantaneously. That would be no good for, say, propelling a spacecraft. But it was very useful in powering his new Pulsar design, which could scale its power usage up, almost without limit.

Scaling down the power of a pulsar, previously impossible, now worked, but only in one narrow range of energies, but that would be useful for pistols, which Ravashol had designed and Alfred planned to build a few of, for testing purposes at least.

Each shot from a MUPPET used up about as much tylium as a Viper would on a long patrol that included some combat.

And while tylium was precious, that amount was fairly small, especially when compared with the potential of destroying an entire Base Star.

Firing it tended to produce tremendous strain on whatever the Pulsar was mounted on, and the Pulsar needed to be very sturdily built too, which is why he called it a Massive Unlimited Planetary Pulsar. The rest of its name - Everything Terminator, was a simple description of how effective it could be. There wasn't anything it couldn't destroy in a single shot, though if it tried to take out anything bigger than a medium-sized asteroid, it would exceed the tolerances of its own construction and also be destroyed, possibly taking a lot of the surrounding bedrock with it.

Shots from the MUPPET also traveled much further and faster than shots from a normal pulsar, and so could often hit dodging fighters as well as bigger ships, though that got harder as the range got longer, since the shot did still take a moment to traverse really large distances.

That was because, while any hyperspace bubble, whether around a ship or around a Pulsar's pulse of plasma, needed energy to maintain it & that was a limiter of their speed, Doctor Ravashol had found a way to supply that energy from the plasma itself. And his plasmas were very highly energized indeed.

So MUPPET shots had much higher hyperspace speeds than regular pulsar shots did.

Much much higher.

It's range was, more or less, anything within the same galaxy, as long as it had targeting coordinates.

So Doctor Ravashol could easily shoot down the 3 Base Stars following the ragtag fleet, but before doing so, he wanted to make deals for constructing more defenses for Tairac.

He was very protective of the clones, and of his other technological creations.

The Council heard and considered Ravashol's request, but complained that they had no free production to spare for him - all the official production was committed to various tasks already, chiefly the expansion and improvement of living quarters of the people of the fleet. That was a program that no Council yet had dared to alter or reduce, fearing that the people would feel entitled to it and be angry and vote them out if they reduced it or altered the schedule for it.

Despite the fact that Alfred's Liberty Ships had so far provided far more living space than the upgrades to existing living quarters that Hephaestus was mostly tasked with doing, the Council wasn't willing to touch the entitlement program.

So they 'regretfully informed' Doctor Ravashol that they couldn't help him build the things he wanted, and pointed out that the ragtag fleet was moving forwards anyway, and was used to being chased by Base Stars, so they didn't need his help.

They also pointed out that the Base Stars could attack him as well as the fleet, and that he may want to defend himself from them while he could.

While they were pointing that out, Alfred had sent an urgent message to Malkex, the commander of his soldiers.

Malkex was still on planet and happened to be within the same complex of buildings as Ravashol.

Borellian No-Men normally do not hurry, but Malkex recognized the importance of Alfred's message and hurried over to Doctor Ravashol's office, bursting in and summarizing Alfred's offer before the very angry Doctor Ravashol gave a response to the Council that all would regret.

Ravashol was decisive and did not take long to consider.

So instead of the very insulting and confrontational response he'd been preparing to make to the Council, Ravashol instead gave them a simple acknowledgment and ended the call, then immediately opened a new call to Alfred to discuss details.

Alfred had left the Council chambers and took the call on the way to his shuttle.

They did not need to haggle long, as both were reasonable men who stood to gain a lot if the deal were right.

In the end, they settled on a deal where Alfred would build 3 more MUPPETS on Tairac, spread out over the planet to cover all approaches, plus several base facilities, fairly extensive anti-fighter defenses, and some mirrors in orbit of Tairac's sun. These mirrors would have enough sensors and attitude jets to enable them to aim extra sunlight at Tairac at all times. They were curved just right so that their beams of sunlight would spread across a whole hemisphere of the planet - wider than that and some light would be wasted, smaller than that would cause severe weather, or maybe even damage to those within the beam. But spread out across the face of the planet, they would warm it significantly.

The anti-fighter defenses were probably redundant and unnecessary, given the MUPPETS covered all approaches to the planet. But Ravashol wanted to be sure.

Alfred threw in the best possible communication facilities they could build, so that the MUPPETS could be called on for help from a distance.

To enable Alfred to have time for the construction, the ragtag fleet would stay in orbit over Tairac, protected by the MUPPET Sweetums. That time and protection would also allow repairs to the still-damaged Galactica, and was therefore acceptable to Adama, who exerted his influence to get the Council to agree to the delay.

In exchange Alfred got what he wanted most - the technology for how to build MUPPETS, plus cloning technology, and miscellaneous tidbits like the plans for building Cylon Raiders, both piloted and remote-controlled types, which had been captured with former Cylon base and repair station.

The cloning technology he wanted, not because he had ideas about duplicating important or skilled people, but because many people had been wounded during the course of the war and lost limbs or had similar damage that could be repaired with cloning technology. Regrowing those limbs would get a lot more of their people able to work again.

And every little bit helped.

As soon as the deal was signed, Ravashol put on an impressive display with Sweetums the MUPPET. He fired 56 times in rapid succession, taking out 3 Base Stars, 4 Cylon Bases on medium or small asteroids, and 4 patrols of 12 Cylon Raiders each. Only one shot missed a fighter, but a follow-on shot got it.

Recon Vipers of all models then flew out far and wide to find if any more Cylons were nearby. The few they found did not last long, as the MUPPET took the targeting data they fed it and blasted all the Cylons in the area.

The ragtag fleet was very appreciative of the rest and respite - no Cylons could hurt them while orbiting Tairac. It is amazing what difference it makes to have a huge burden, like the constant fear of imminent destruction, removed.

Alfred had no trouble getting folks to go down to the planet and work on his building projects there.

Rather, they had trouble getting them to come back to the fleet again.

In many ways, living in a box in space is not much different than living in a box on an inhospitable planet.

Either way, you are dependent on machinery, such as heating systems, to keep you alive.

But on the planet, it was easy to expand your living space - your box. And far more important than that was the issue of safety. On the planet, they were safe from the Cylons.

And the planet was already getting warmer as the first few big mirrors orbiting the sun sent more sunlight its way.

Even while the building projects were only partway completed, Alfred could see how things were going, and martialed his arguments.

At the next Council meeting, he gave it his best shot.

"Councilors, our long trek since leaving the 12 Colonies has been aimed at finding Earth. But I ask you to consider again: Why Earth? Why remain focused on that goal? Sure, at first we desperately needed something to hope for, and Earth filled that need and kept us going. It was a great goal when nothing else offered any hope. We hoped it would be a safe place to settle again - a place that could defend us, and we supposed Earth was the only choice. But really what we need is just a place to settle and rebuild, and some way to make it safe. Now, as far as places to settle go - we have several choices which we know will work - planets where people have been living for a long time. But they were no good to us while we couldn't defend them adequately from the Cylons, who would inevitably come. Now, with the Planetary Pulsar weapon, such a defense is possible. We have the ability to build a sufficient number of these weapons on any planet to make it unassailable.

With the Planetary Pulsar weapon, any of the habitable planets we've passed can be safer than the 12 Colonies ever were. Why keep running, and thereby risking everything, hoping to find a perfect solution at Earth, when we can settle now, even here on Tairac, and make it work?"

The Councilors were unmoved. They squabbled about various potential risks and reasons why it might not work as well as planned.

What they said sounded reasonable - until you really looked into it. Most of the stuff they ever said was like that - it sounded fine but didn't hold up to analysis.

Even Adama was against the idea of giving up the search for Earth. He was very much invested in that search, and wouldn't let it go.

Alfred plead "Don't walk away from something that absolutely will work, for something you hope might work better" but they voted against the idea anyway.

The fleet would move on in its search for Earth as soon as Galactica was repaired.

Alfred did manage to get one big concession. Some of the people of the fleet, about 8% of them, wanted to stay no matter what. By pointing out that slavery was against the law, and that keeping them against their will amounted to slavery in a case like this, Alfred was able to get the Council to allow any to stay who wanted to.

Except the Council required that Alfred himself, and his ships, stay with the fleet. They used the excuse that he'd lose his Council seat if he stayed on the planet, and without that seat they could and would confiscate his 'Councilman's guard' force of soldiers, and all their support. Alfred wasn't willing to challenge that, thin excuse though it was, since if he stayed with the fleet he could still do some good for it.

Those who were staying on Tairac needed places to live, and there was scant time to build enough. So the Council allowed them to keep a few of the oldest and slowest ships. A ship, landed on the planet, effectively amounted to a quick and simple city. Cities had living space conditioned for humans, power and power distribution, communications and so on, and so did ships, even old ones.

This would benefit the fleet as well, since, without the slowest ships, it could speed up a bit. With fewer ships to protect, the fleet could also spread its defenses a little less thinly, and so get better coverage with the same resources.

The ships of the fleet averaged 4,500 passengers each. Many ships had fewer than that, since it had been easier for small ships to escape the 12 Colonies while the Cylons were around, but some bigger ships had escaped as well & had up to 40,000 passengers.

But it was not average ships, but the oldest and slowest, that would remain on Tairac and act as cities. And those included some of the bigger ships.

So the ships chosen to remain would number 12, which seemed to be an oddly appropriate number.

Reshuffling people among the ships that were to go or stay took a bit of time and effort.

The Council begrudged the time that took - they wanted to leave as soon as possible. They were used to constantly hurrying away from the Cylons and could not shake the feeling that any delay would doom them.

In Council meeting, when Alfred tried to get more time, so the facilities on Tairac could be improved for the folks who would remain, the Council was adamantly opposed.

They feared impending doom if they didn't hurry away.

In response to those fears, Alfred said "But everything is different now.",

and was surprised when Councilman Chel responded "You're right, we can offer to give the Cylons the tech to the Planetary Pulsar if they'll leave us alone."

Several other Councilors seized on this idea and argued in favor.

Alfred was horrified.

He said "You can't be serious - you want to give away the one big advantage we have over the Cylons which might allow us to survive and even rebuild, and do it on the groundless hope that what has never worked before will work this time for some reason? Never has any peace attempt with the Cylons succeeded, or even progressed towards success. Can you seriously be so impressed with yourselves that you think you will succeed where everyone else had failed, and do it without even trying to prepare somehow?"

It did not have the intended effect. Alfred had hoped to get them to recognize the self-destructive absurdity of their proposed actions.

But what they got out of it was that they needed to prepare a bit more.

So they called for one of the Cylon prisoners to be brought to the chamber, so they could talk to it.

Three Cylons had been stunned and captured on Tairac - actual living breathing Cylons, not the robots they often used as pilots and warriors. Living Cylons were almost never seen, so there wasn't even a word anymore to distinguish them from their robot warriors.

Living Cylons were a picture of ugliness, with a bulky body resembling a pile of jagged and lumpy stones, swamp gray skin, and many eyes. They appeared to be something in-between a reptile and an insect.

But perhaps their most striking feature was their lumpy heads, containing a variable number of brains.

Simple Cylon workers had one brain and were not very capable. They were comparable, in some ways, to drones in a beehive - they had no initiative, no free will, and were slow to act and react.

Cylon leaders and scientists had a second brain and were roughly as capable as humans.

And it was said that the current and past Cylon Imperious Leaders each had a third brain, giving them great capabilities. No human but Baltar had ever met Imperious Leader and survived it, and he wasn't exactly a reliable source, but in this case it was credible - those lumpy heads could clearly accommodate a third brain.

It was speculated that living Cylons were the result of experiments by some unknown alien race long ago, since such an odd setup for brains could not have evolved.

Two of the captured Cylons were single-brain types - the most common variant by far.

But one was a scientist and had two brains.

The Councilors sent for that one to be brought, so they could negotiate, then started happily chattering about how their reputations would be eternal, and their re-elections guaranteed, once their plan worked.

Alfred had better things to do than watch them try to give away their only advantage, so he said

"As with most decisions from this Council, this decision is stupid, short-sighted, divorced from reality, self-destructive, and really just about reaffirming your own power and authority. Giving advantages to implacable foes is never a good idea.", then without waiting for a reply, he turned and left.

Adama excused himself and left as well.

Both had seen the recorded interrogations of these captive Cylons and knew there was nothing to be gained from further attempts to reason with such quarrelsome and belligerent beings who, rather than even responding to questions, simply made endless streams of threats.

So rather than waste time, they wanted to get back to their normal jobs. The career politicians, as usual, had not done their homework and would have to find out for themselves.

In the hallway Adama asked "They don't seem to realize that they don't have the Planetary Pulsar technology - it was traded by Ravashol to you, not to them. Are you going to give it to them if they demand it?"

Alfred thoughtfully replied "There's no way I could do that in good conscience - it'd be as bad as when that idiot Councilor at Carillon proposed unilaterally disarming ourselves in hopes that the Cylons would be nice to us if we did."

Adama frowned and said "I agree, but you'd better look into your legal options if they demand it, you may find yourself in jail and the technology seized."

Alfred sighed and said "You're right of course. I guess at worst I and my ships could simply break away and leave - not that that's a good choice, but you do what you must, and the fleet, with or without my ships, would be better off without the Cylons having such a weapon.".

Adama nodded slightly, they parted ways and Alfred got back to his backlog of work.

There, at least, he was pleasantly surprised.

Doctor Ravashol had sent him an urgent request for another trade. Ravashol had previously invented - and kept secret so the Cylons didn't get it - a new ceramic that was a superconductor of heat, and he wanted Alfred to build for him a number of sidewalks made out of it, to help heat his labs and the clones' village.

He hadn't mentioned it before since there was limited time and getting more MUPPETS built was more urgent.

But with the build queues progressing nicely, he judged that it could be fit in before the fleet left, if they hurried. So he wanted to hurry and try to get it done.

Superconductors are odd things.

Normal materials conduct heat along themselves at a certain rate, which can be faster or slower depending on how good a conductor they are. Put one end of an iron rod into a hot fire and you'll see how it works - the tip of the rod will get hottest and reflect that by its color. Then the temperatures will decrease along the rod - the further away from the fire they were, the cooler they'll be. If you keep it in the fire, gradually the whole rod will heat up, because the heat does get conducted along the rod, though that conduction is anything but instantaneous.

Put a rod made of an insulator into a fire the same way, and the heat will tend to stay on only the part of the rod that is in the fire, since insulators conduct very poorly.

So the rods can have very different temperatures at different points along their lengths because the heat gets transmitted well, or poorly, faster or slower, depending on what the rod is made of.

But a superconductor is special - it instantaneously equalizes its temperature along its whole length.

In another example, if air was a superconductor of heat (which it most emphatically is not), then if you cooked something in an oven at 400 degrees, the moment you opened that oven, all the heat would get evenly distributed around the air in the room. In a room 50 times the volume of the oven, and at 75 degrees temperature, that would mean 50 volumes of air at 75 degrees and 1 volume of air at 400 degrees would instantly exchange heat and become 51 volumes of air at 81.37 degrees.

All that was for superconductors of heat.

A superconductor for electricity would work very similarly - all electricity being conducted instantly along it regardless of distance.

And theoretically, a material could be a superconductor of both heat and electricity.

But what Doctor Ravashol had developed was a simple ceramic that was a superconductor of heat - it would instantly equalize heat along its length and through its whole volume. So he wanted sidewalks made of it and run all through the areas he wanted heated - his labs and the village of clones, so that he could just heat one end with waste industrial heat, or even laser blasts, and have the whole area heat up a little. A laser blast that would normally raise the temperature of a very small area by thousands of degrees and vaporize it would, with this ceramic, instead heat the whole system of sidewalks by a fraction of a degree or so, depending on how extensive that sidewalk system was.

And Doctor Ravashol knew Alfred had continuous extrusion machines that could lay such sidewalks very quickly.

So the bargaining commenced, and each side ended up getting what they thought was a good deal.

Alfred got the technology so he could make superconducting ceramic himself. There were a number of good uses for that. It should, for one thing, make the turtle shells of his Liberty Ships far far more effective in resisting Cylon laser blasts.

He also got all the plans, for building and maintaining anything which the Cylon fighter repair base on Tairac could build or repair. That included Cylon warrior robots and pilots. If they built any of those, they'd get all-new programming before ever being activated, just to be as safe as possible.

And since nobody really wanted the wreck of the Cylon freighter G12 and the 300 remote-control type Raiders it contained, he got those too. They were Ravashol's to give, since they were on his planet, but he kept only their tylium fuel. Others had rejected the G12 wreck due to the extensive repairs it would need. Mainly the wreck would need new engines, since its own were ruined - needing a full rebuild - and they did not know how to build Cylon reactionless engines. The repair base had information on repairing them, but it did not add up to enough information to do a full rebuild.

The ship it needed reactionless engines, since it had space for its engine only in the middle of the ship - not at the edge like most ships.

But they could build, and fit, the reactionless engines whose designs they'd found on Kobol.

They set out to do so, for G12 and also for F105, since both Cylon freighters would need engines that used fuels other than tylium.

Until it was repaired, Alfred could tow it along.

And once repaired, there were always several uses a ship could be put to, even if he wasn't quite sure yet which would be best.

Alfred would have gotten all the wrecked Cylon Raiders and destroyed Cylon warrior robots off the planet, to use as raw materials, but they'd already been used that way. The "temporary base" his troops had started to build on Tairac had just kept growing and expanding. His people there had the tools and experience, and all they needed was raw materials - which they got in the form of destroyed Cylon equipment - to build out the base as something permanent for the folks who would be leaving the ragtag fleet and taking up residence on Tairac.

That base now included enough machinery for all the work it would need to do in expanding itself and in helping Humanity to flourish on Tairac.

Ravashol got quite a bit for his valuable Superconductor technology.

First, he got his sidewalks built.

And until the mirrors orbiting his sun, and the sidewalks, heated things up, he wanted things to protect his people, and the new immigrants, from the cold. So he got a couple hundred spacesuits, all the emergency spacesuits, and a dozen each of SnowRams and shuttles.

He also wanted to be able to target his Planetary Pulsars on things far away. The further out he could shoot them, the safer he'd be.

So he got a dozen Recon Vipers to do active scouting. He chose model 1a - the type with a pilot and minimal armament, since flying along in the self-piloting Viper could be a good way to train new pilots.

Additionally, he got 40 Sensor Buoys made and deployed, plus machinery to make more.

These were something like mines - self-contained little machines that got left out in space to do their job. But the similarity stopped there. Mines contain minimal sensors and lots of explosives. But Sensor Buoys contain lots of sensors and communications, and no explosives at all. Their job was to constantly scan space for anything and everything, and send the data back to base - Tairac in this case. If they detected a Cylon, the MUPPETS on Tairac could shoot it down without it ever getting near.

And because Doctor Ravashol was a careful man, who was aware that the Galactica had tried to defend itself from the Planetary Pulsar by jamming all communications, so that coordinates could not be called in for attack, he set up alternate communication systems in his Sensor Buoys. In addition to their usual communications gear, each also mounted lasers designed for long-range communications. The only way to jam those was to get in-between them and their target - the base on Tairac in this case.

Now, at the distances involved and in the time-frames required to shoot down ships, lasers would ordinarily be useless - they transmitted at the speed of light, but that was a very slow crawl compared to ships traveling in Hyperspace bubbles. So any attempt to use communication lasers to get targeting data back to Tairac would fail due to transmission delay - the ship would be long gone before the laser beams carrying the information arrived.

But Ravashol, in his genius, had thought of that.

The Geoscan was the longest-ranged sensor the humans had. It's scans were instantaneous regardless of distance. And it could detect anything - rocks, comets, large or small ships, or lighted-up billboards, which is how the signal lasers would appear to it. It could not only see the lights on the Sensor Buoys, it could read their messages. It could have read the print on a simpe billboard, or even semaphore flags, at that distance, and a pattern of lights was much easier.

So the Sensor Buoys were placed for maximum range - as far out from the planet as Geoscan sensors could detect, resulting in a large bubble around the planet of continuous scanning and instant communication. And in some cases, a second rank of Sensor Buoys was placed further out - at the maximum sensor range of the 1st rank of Buoys. As they built more Sensor Buoys, they'd be added to that 2nd rank.

So anything in range of Tairac's Geoscans would be detected. And anything beyond that, to the range of the 1st rank of sensor buoys would be detected. And anything beyond that, to the range of the 2nd rank of sensor buoys would also be detected.

And the targeting coordinates of anything detected would instantly be had at Tairac regardless of jamming.

Nothing was going to sneak up on Tairac.

Alfred, as the builder of the Sensor Buoys, got the plans for them by default.

Lastly Ravashol wanted to make sure he had the means to service the orbital mirrors and the sensor buoys, and to emplace more at need. And he didn't trust the dilapidated ships which the ragtag fleet was leaving behind. They were the oldest ships in the fleet - the ones the fleet could best do without. But that also meant they were in the worst shape, and unreliable.

He wanted a Liberty Ship, and the plans to make more.

The delay at the planet had allowed Alfred's folks to finish pods 25-30 and commission them as Liberty Ships, with 2 dedicated to making more pre-Marron drives for the fleet, 2 dedicated to making more Vipers, and one each working on more Liberty Ships and miscellaneous work.

But his construction program was continuous - when they finished one Liberty Ship, they started another, except for any built outside the usual sequence, like those built to house the refugees from Proteus.

Because of those continuous efforts, and the time spent at Tairac, pods 31 and 32 were just about ready for commissioning. They were so close that the next few hulls - for pods 33, 34, 35 and 36 - had been started.

So pod 31 was given, along with the few parts still necessary to finish it, and the machines to do so, to Doctor Ravashol, to stay at Tairac.

An entire brand-new ship was a lot to give, so it was understood that Doctor Ravashol would owe future favors, within reason, to Alfred.

They closed the deal on good terms, and got busy building so they could finish before the ragtag fleet was scheduled to leave. The Council had decreed the date and tine for that, and it was fast approaching.

For everything he left on Tairac, except the emergency spacesuits, Alfred made sure replacements got put into his build queues.

He also looked over some requests his soldiers had made for new equipment, and added them to the build queues too.

The soldiers had felt a need for heavier weaponry of the indirect fire sort, so had asked for the some to be developed and deployed.

They wanted some of the head-sized mini mines, which were working out so well for the Vipers, to be adapted to be launched by the steam projectors on their tripod and pintle-mounted lasers.

Similarly they wanted something like the guided Solenite dart, but bigger - a full Solenite grenade with a guidance package - to be launched from those same tripod lasers.

And they wanted an adapter so that the steam projectors on their rifles could better launch their drones into the air. Launching that way had been awkward, but had proven stealthy enough that the Cylons had not noticed and shot down the drones. They wanted the awkwardness to go away, and with new adapters, it would.

And lastly they had come up with a plan for attacking in close quarters - such as had existed on top of Pulsar Mountain - and clearing out enemies with minimal loss.

Their decoy balloons worked fine, but they were concerned that a larger number of defenders would negate that advantage.

So they had come up with the idea to use Doctor Ravashol's Plasma Pistols. These pistols were very massively scaled-down versions of his Planetary Pulsar. There was only one point where the variables in the complicated Pulsar physics came together right and made a workable plasma weapon at any size smaller than the ship-mounted kind.

But plasma pistols, despite many changes between them and other pulsars, were a functional weapon. They didn't have hyperspace bubbles around their shots, so they would be comparatively short-ranged weapons. But by substituting a mild forcefield in place of the hyperspace bubble, they would manage a range of 500 metrons or so. Without that forcefield - which dissolved on contact with any solid object - the plasma would start dissipating the moment it left the pistol, leaving it as an area effect weapon - a cone of plasma with only 10 metrons or so range.

Each shot from a plasma pistol would hit about as hard as a shot from a laser rifle.

But the neat thing the soldiers had thought of was smoke. Thick smoke would rapidly dissipate a laser blast and render it harmless, but it did nothing to impair plasma blasts.

So the soldiers wanted to equip a few special squads with plasma pistols, back-pack mounted smoke generators, and visors for thermal-vision.

These squads could take on any close quarters fighting, such as clearing out an enemy house-to-house or boarding a ship. They'd generate thick smoke, see through it with their visors, and shoot through it with their plasma pistols.

It sounded very useful, so Alfred queued it all up.


	19. Chapter 19

Chapter 19

Alfred wasted no time in ordering, for completion as soon as possible, all his ships with outer Turtle shells, to get those replaced by the same thing, only made of Ravashol's superconducting ceramic.

He scheduled the BattleSphere to get a coating of it as well.

The turtle shells were designed to be easy to replace, and most of the existing materials could be ground down, then doped with certain elements to make them superconducting, re-cast, and re-used.

And the BattleSphere had no openings except the large airlocks, and could therefore be covered easily.

So the project would proceed quickly.

And it should have dramatic effects.

A laser blast capable of vaporizing a cubic metron of iron by raising its temperature 3000 degrees - such as the blasts coming from laser turrets, Vipers, and Cylon Raiders - would, when it hit a superconducting turtle shell of 90,321 cubic metrons volume, like that on a Liberty Ship, only raise the temperature of each and every cubic metron in that turtle shell by .033 degrees. So a ship with such a turtle shell could shrug off many hits without any damage.

Unfortunately, most 'normal' ships could not benefit from a coating of superconductor. First off you needed as much mass of superconductor as you could get, to distribute the heat as harmlessly as possible. A little superconductor could be vaporized as easily as a little of anything else.

And secondly most ships had very complicated surfaces, including a vast number of access and maintenance panels, personnel airlocks, waste dump chutes, and sensors for things like hull temperature. Building codes back on the 12 Colonies had required this. Even just trying to coat such a surface would be error prone & effort intensive & probably end up with too little superconductor to help.

Alfred's ships, built to be simple so they could make them quickly, had extremely simple surfaces, already protected by an armored layer unpierced by anything except at the ends.

So those ships could be coated easily, and even their ends could get partially coated.

A thin coating on the ends would be fully effective, as long as it was connected to the thick coating elsewhere, since that connection would still allow heat transmissiom in any amount.

Alfred was contemplating how to do a coating - even a very thin one, as long as it was connected to the turtle shell - of superconductor over the engines and other exposed surfaces of Liberty Ships, when Sally burst in.

"Unc! You're still alive!" She ran up and gave him a hug.

"Yes, as far as I know, why, what happened?"

"Oh Unc - it's terrible - the Council chamber is covered in blood and body parts, and the schedule said you were in there!"

"I left early - less than an hour ago, since the Council insisted on a pointless meeting with a captured Cylon... oh no. Is this going where I think it's going?"

"Yes," Sally sniffed, trying to suppress strong emotions. "The recordings show Councilman Chel playing with a data crystal - you know how he likes to fidget - and talking about giving the Cylons a super-weapon if they'll be nice to us, when the Cylon attacked. Folks are speculating that the Cylon thought the super-weapon technology was on that data crystal and he wanted to take it and escape. But whatever his reasons, he went berserk and tore the Council members limb from limb before the Galactica's Warriors arrived and stunned him. I'm so glad you're ok!"

Alfred sighed "I assumed they would leave him in his restraints, but I guess they didn't do their homework there either. It's easy to forget, since we capture so few, that Cylons are immensely strong physically. But they're not strong enough to get out of the restraints he'd been in, so apparently they let him out of those as a 'token of goodwill' or something. Always do your homework Sally."

"Yes Unc."

They each remained silent for a moment, assimilating the situation, then Sally said

"Have you got any new ideas for how to elect better folks as replacement Councilors this time?"

Alfred sighed. "Not really - just the same kind of campaigning to get practical folks elected. It should eventually sink in and gain traction, right?"

Neither had a hopeful word to offer about that, so each remained silent.

To cheer things up, Sally offered

"People used to call this ship 'Colonial movers' because of the sign on the side. But now I've heard some folks calling it 'Colonial Movers and Shakers' - apparently it's a phrase meaning 'people who get stuff done' and refers to the fleet feeling safe now that we have Planetary Pulsars on our side."

"I like that. Thanks for pointing it out. Though speaking of getting things done, we have work to do - there's a deadline."

They got back to work preparing for the fleet to leave Tairac the next day. That's when Galactica's repairs would be done, and previous Council decree had set that as the time to leave this planet.

They got busy making sure that the only people and things which remained on Tairac were the ones that were supposed to.

While Alfred took care of the often boring details of that, he reflected that he'd have loved to have upgraded Galactica while it was having its repairs done. They had not, because Galactica was state of the art with a highly integrated design - you couldn't change one thing on it without affecting 5 others. To successfully make changes - to make them without it actually being a downgrade because other affected systems were negatively impacted - would require a design bureau far more extensive than anything they had.

But it would have been neat if they could have.

After making arrangements for leaving the planet, they started making arrangements for Commissioning the ships that Fred the FRD had been building. It seemed like they'd been a long time in building, until you recognized that they were full warships, with multiple redundancies and many specialized fittings.

By comparison, the Liberty Ships built and completed quickly. But they were a no-frills design, completely standardized, where they cut every corner that could safely be cut, for maximum build-speed.

The 5 Frigates, 5 Firebases, and 3 Destroyer Escorts would be the first warships commissioned into the human fleet since the loss of the 12 Colonies, so a big ceremony was planned for just after the fleet left Tairac.

Alfred was turning over all 5 Frigates to the Borellians, who knew how to use them and had specialized tactics for them.

He'd crew the others with his own people, who'd been training on simulators for that, ever since he started building the ships. He'd offered to let Galactica crew them, but they'd said they didn't have crew to spare, which is why he'd started training new folks.

They wouldn't be highly polished experts in manning such ships, but they would be competent.

Alfred had already named his ships Firebase 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and Destroyer Escort 1, 2, 3, before he found out that the Borellians had come up with much more imaginative names for their Frigates.

The 5 Frigates would be named Angry, Garrison, Jefferson, StarWarrior, and Husskies, after people or concepts the Borellians admired, with Garrison and Jefferson being the lead ships in each group of 3.

By comparison, Alfred felt his ship names were inadequate somehow. But he wasn't worried about it enough to bother changing them.

He had no problem with the idea that some folks were better at some things, like naming ships, than he was.

When the ships launched the next day, Fred the FRD would start building new ships. There had been some discussion as to what it should build, but all the same reasons still applied which they'd originally had for their choices. So they were going to build another set just like the first set, with the exception that, as they'd gained experience, they'd figured out how to use build space more efficiently & so could not fit in one more Frigate.

So tomorrow they'd start building 6 new Frigates, 5 new Firebases, and 3 new Destroyer Escorts.

Planning took the rest of that day.

The next morning, all too soon from Alfred's perspective, Galactica's repairs were completed and, by previous Council order, the fleet had to leave Tairac.

Communications channels, except for a few emergency ones, were tied up solid as people said goodbye to those who were staying. And it looked like that would remain so for days.

It impacted the election for new Council members. Announcements and campaigning could be made from within a ship to within that ship. But no announcements or campaigning managed to secure 'airtime' in inter-ship communications, because people saying goodbyes had requested and reserved that time first.

And while candidates for Council rushed frantically between ships to campaign, they couldn't manage the usual levels.

So some interesting results happened.

In the first round of the election, where everybody could run, several new names - not the same old professional politicians - had reasonable showings.

Sally rushed in to Alfred's office, and with great excitement proclaimed "They're popular! I knew my shows were getting watched, but it's another thing to see them get votes for Council without even having run!"

"Hold on a second, back up - what shows and what people are we talking about?" Alfred asked.

"Remember when you said I could make a Reality TV show about pilot Rudel and others? Well I did it. We have 5 now. I know you don't watch shows, but they're getting so popular I thought you may even have heard of them."

"Nope, sorry. Tell me about them."

Sally did so.

It turned out that, Sally had head-mounted or shoulder-mounted video cameras on 5 people, which sent in streams of data to be edited and sent out to anyone who wanted to watch. The 5 people were each coached to talk a lot, to provide a running commentary, but otherwise be themselves. They were paid for the work, though some seemed to like the work enough that they may have been willing to do it for free.

The "Reality Stars" were a varied bunch.

There was Rudel who flew shuttles, Vipers and Training Vipers, and demonstrated and discussed them all, while throwing in stories of his former days as a stunt pilot.

In addition to Rudel, there was Marie, who was expert at, and very much enjoyed showing off, several crafts including sewing and cooking. It wasn't easy to come up with varied recipes given the limited types of foods available, but Marie managed it. Her show, especially the cooking segment, was the most popular one Sally had.

There was Yosh the video gamer. He was in the top 1% on the games that listed players by skill levels, and he enjoyed giving a running commentary, as he played games, of how to do well in them and other tips. He played several different games and had a wide following for each.

And Codan the soldier and Rango the machinist had each worn a video camera during the assault on Tairac. Codan had been with the Bantam force and had filmed that part of the attack, while Rango had been at the temporary base filming all aspects of that and describing what was being done and why.

With Rudel's film of the shuttle-borne troops capturing the Pulsar Landing Strip, they had covered the attack pretty well between them.

When not filming exceptional things like attacks, each mostly talked about his job, but they had respectable numbers of viewers as well.

All of them liked to tell stories of their lives before the fall of the 12 Colonies.

Sally stopped her description saying "that reminds me, I have to show you this!" and pulled out a picture.

"It was taken by the Rudel's shuttle as he went up Pulsar Mountain, just as he passed the group of climbers led by Apollo and Croft. It's now Croft's favorite picture!"

It was a close up view, showing 5 humans climbing the icy mountain. Apollo was in the lead, and the picture caught him looking into the camera with a complex look on his face - at once showing surprise, dismay, and annoyance.

Croft was shown just behind Apollo and also looking at the camera with a satisfied and cynical smirk on his face.

"I can see why he likes it," Alfred said. "But did you say your Reality Stars are getting votes for Council?"

"Yes," Sally gushed. "Isn't it wonderful? Their vote tallies are all under 10%, but the fact that they have any at all is amazing - none of them officially ran for office!"

Alfred agreed and they discussed the election possibilities for a while.

The first round of elections was open to anyone. Then there were commonly 3 or 4 runoff elections. In each one, the bottom 70% of candidates were eliminated and the top 30% of candidates from the previous round vied for votes.

So it was common for candidates in each round to have a small percentage of overall votes.

Rudel had officially dropped out, even though his numbers would have secured him a place in the next round. He said he didn't want to be on the Council and he joked that, at least recently, being a fighter pilot was safer.

But the rest, especially Marie, had a real chance, though slim, of getting elected.

Alfred sighed "They say 'if you can't beat them, join them'. Normally that is bad advice, but in this case, let's try it. We haven't been able to get folks to vote sensibly. Rather they keep voting for whomever is popular. Fine. Let's try to make some good candidates popular. Sally, I'd like you to expand your reality TV shows. Make a bunch of good folks popular and lets see what happens."

Sally was enthusiastic about the idea, and they spent a while discussing specifics.

So the next time Sally rushed in excitedly, Alfred thought she was about to report some success or other with Reality TV.

He was wrong.

"Unc, they cloned Starbuck!"

"Who?"

Sally sighed "I mention him all the time - he's one of the 'Popular Kids' as you call them - a pilot on the Galactica. He leads a very interesting life."

"Sorry Sally - I'm not ignoring you. It's just that I'm not great with names - especially when I don't think the people named will matter to me at all. You say they cloned this Starbuck - who is 'they' and why did they do it?"

Sally got excited again "Starbuck is very popular with the ladies, but there isn't enough of him to go around, so two of these ladies, Athena and Cassiopeia - they're also Popular Kids I mention sometimes - they're especially close to him & each wanted their own Starbuck. So each went to Doctor Ravashol with a lock of Starbuck's hair and got themselves a clone. Apparently they did this independent of each-other."

"That could have interesting ramifications..." Alfred mused.

"Boy are they learning that!" Sally said. "When you think of a clone you think of a perfect copy. And they got perfect copies, but only in a way. They each got a perfect Starbuck grown from his DNA. But DNA doesn't code your experiences or memories - only your physical body."

"Ah, I see. They say that 'A man is the sum of his experience' but your DNA is set at conception and does not change as you experience things and learn. So they got some kind of 'empty copy' - a Starbuck body with what, no more knowledge than an infant?"

"Pretty close - it turns out that Ravashol has video recordings he can play in front of a room full of clones growing in their tanks. They take about a week to grow and in that time they will have learned to speak about as well as a child about 4 yahrens old. But that's it."

"So they have 4-yahren-old equivalents who don't even know how to feed and clean themselves?"

"Not quite Unc. They say that a new clone's empty brain soaks up new knowledge amazingly fast, and they learned quickly for another week or so after coming out of the cloning tanks. But it slowed down to a normal learning rate at roughly an early teenage level of information and skills - though with zero formal training or schooling."

"So their copies of Starbuck are mentally teenagers in a mature adult's body, but without the knowledge of spelling, basic math and so on that you pick up in school?"

"Yep, and Starbuck as a teenager was apparently a real pain - always getting into things because of his daredevil and feisty attitude."

"I imagine those two ladies are pretty disappointed with that."

"Oh, yeah. This is not what they expected at all. They're good people and have accepted responsibility for the clones until the clones can manage on their own. But if they had not voluntarily accepted that, nobody would know what to do - this falls outside the definitions for all the existing legal protections for children, the disabled and so on. But though they have accepted the responsibilities of a parent, they don't have the rights to go with it and back it up - a parent can punish their offspring at need, like confining them to their rooms or taking away privileges, but if Athena or Cassiopeia tried confining Starbuck clones to their rooms, they'd run afoul of the unlawful imprisonment laws set up to prevent kidnapping and such. So both clones are learning they can get away with anything & that is Not good."

"No, I imagine not, especially given that Starbuck's personality tends towards that anyway, from what you've said." Alfred mused.

"Yup, very much so. But he had experiences as he was growing up that taught him where the limits were. The clones haven't, and so are being far more extreme. Worse, they have no qualms about pretending to be the real Starbuck for fun or advantages. That's causing everybody a lot of grief."

"I can see we're going to need laws covering this sort of thing. I will get Cecil's help figuring out what those need to be." Alfred said, then added "And I'm going to order that the new cloning tanks we've been building be used only for parts - arms, legs, livers, eyes, and such - to be used for patching up wounded and disabled people. We'll just grow parts & not whole bodies. We don't need the problems that would come from folks trying to make their own copies of people to try to bring back long-lost relatives and such. It wouldn't work as they hope it would, and would complicate things as we try to deal with what are effectively overgrown children."

He sighed as he thought about bringing back his dead wife from a lock of her hair, but didn't pursue it, knowing that it wouldn't be her, but a whole new and different person, though in the same body.

He did NOT want someone that looked like his wife to see him as a stranger. That would wreck too many of his memories.

He sighed again and got back to work.

He was arranging schedules to fit in lots more production of Recon Vipers, when the Cylons attacked.

As the ragtag fleet passed around an anonymous sun, 4 Cylon Base Stars that had been hiding behind it came around and attacked them, with their 1200 Raider fighters.

Their formation was sloppy - one Base Star at the edge of their formation briefly came within a direct line of distant Tairac. Coordinates were called in fast enough and that Base Star exploded as a blast from a Planetary Pulsar caught it.

The blast was vigorous enough to damage some Cylon Raiders too, as fragments of the destroyed Base Star spattered outward, and acted as shrapnel.

But the rest of the Base Stars and fighters swept in on the ragtag fleet, while keeping the star in-between themselves and Tairac.

The ragtag fleet launched everything they could to meet them and fight back.

The combat units and firepower of the ragtag fleet had been steadily growing. In addition to the newly commissioned Frigates, Firebases, and Destroyer Escorts, they had more Liberty Ships than ever devoted to making Vipers. And they'd had a while to do so while in orbit around Tairac.

So while the usual 160 Vipers launched from Galactica, the 14 Liberty Ships, plus one pod almost ready for commissioning, each launched 10 more. At the same time, the 6 Frigates each launched 6 Vipers and the 3 Destroyer Escorts each launched 12.

Additionally some ships had started getting Vipers assigned to their dockers, and 20 more Vipers launched from there.

So all, told, 402 Vipers went out to meet the 3 Base Stars and their remaining 1104 Raiders.

The BattleSphere Mousetrap, while hurrying towards the enemy, launched all 80 of its Training Vipers, as well as its 48 Recon Vipers. But those all stayed with the ships of the fleet for defense.

Well before the friendly and enemy fighters met, the Firebase ships opened up.

They, and the Destroyer Escorts, fired all their Pulsars, concentrating on one of the Base Stars.

Ship-mounted Pulsars had never been tried in massed numbers before. In ones and twos they were underwhelming - overkill for fighters at 10 times what was needed to kill it, but weak versus Base Stars. But 36 Pulsars, each firing all 4 of their shots at the same target, really messed it up.

The Cylon Base Star they hit was damaged about 60% of the way to outright destruction. Individual Pulsar hits messed it up more than 10 blasts from a fighter or laser turret would, since individual powerful blasts gave the Base Star's skintight forcefields no time to recharge, like 10 smaller blasts would.

So, with fires raging and systems out, the damaged Base Star fled. It was their usual way - to disengage in cases like that, then repair and fight again another day.

While fleeting, it was careful to keep the local sun in-between it and Tairac so it couldn't be picked off by the Planetary Pulsar.

The Firebases withdrew to the middle of the fleet to recharge their empty energy stores so they could fire again. Recharging would take much longer than the fight would, but you do what you can in hopes things work out. They each had only 2 laser turrets, which wasn't enough to fight independently, though they did each have a part of the Adama's coordinated fire plan.

With that plan, each armed ship had its assigned zones of fire, which it would defend. Following that plan made the armed ships more effective overall.

As usual, Galactica had been leading the fleet and had to hurry to the rear, since the attack came from behind. So it's guns began the battle outside their maximum range and took longer to get involved than the guns of the ships near the back.

At the back, several ships got ready to meet the oncoming Cylons.

This included the BattleSphere, the FRD, LowBoy, 14 Liberty Ships and a pod almost ready to commission as the 15th Liberty Ship, and 52 ragtag ships which had been upgraded and armed.

While the ships closed on each-other rapidly, the fighters did so much more rapidly.

So the 1104 Cylon Raiders and the 402 human Vipers met first. As usual, each group flew right through the other, while firing and dodging. And as usual, there were some, but not many, hits on each side.

But that was the end of what was usual.

Usually, both groups of fighters would turn and engage the other in the contests of maneuvering called dog-fighting.

But in this case, the human Vipers did not turn, but headed straight for the Base Stars, while 157 Cylon Raiders exploded, having met the mini-mines released by the Vipers as they passed.

Adama had judged that the Base Stars were the bigger threat to the ragtag fleet, and must be neutralized if at all possible before they got into range to fire their heavy anti-ship lasers and missiles.

The humans would likely lose an entire ship for each such heavy weapon the Base Stars could fire.

So while 947 Cylon fighters was a big threat, it was one that the ragtag ships had defenses against, while they had no effective defense against the Base Stars.

So the Vipers went aggressively after the Base Stars, while the other human ships, armed shuttles, vehicles, and soldiers, plus a few Training Vipers and Recon Vipers, prepared to take on the Cylon fighters.

The Cylon fighters hesitated, then 400 of them followed the human Vipers, aiming for shots at the normally undefended tails of the receding Vipers, while the other 547 went after apparently cheap and easy kills among the ragtag ships of the fleet.

The group of 400 Cylon Raiders quickly found out that the Vipers were no longer defenseless to the rear. Over 2000 laser rifles, rear-facing and mounted on the wings of most of the Vipers, volley-fired, then kept firing intermittently as opportunities arose.

There is nothing that spoils your aim like being fired upon.

Between that, and the dodging they were obliged to do anyway, to avoid the blasts from the Base Stars' laser turrets, the Vipers were very hard to hit and so losses were low as they closed in and started blasting the Base Stars.

Normally, standard doctrine calls for 3 Viper squadrons to attack a Base Star.

Four squadrons will kill a Base Star much faster, such that it is quite unlikely to be able to flee after the fight commences.

And in this case, 5 Viper squadrons attacked each Base Star.

The Base Stars didn't last long, but before both Base Stars blew up, one did get a long-range hit with a heavy anti-ship laser on Liberty Ship 8.

It was a lucky shot for them to have hit at all at that range, though, based on past behavior, they had probably actually been shooting at the BattleSphere, which was almost in-line with LS8, and closer.

The closer target would have taken a higher-energy hit, because lasers weakened as they went. That wouldn't be the case in a perfect vacuum, but space is not a perfect vacuum - it has a few particles here and there in any case, and those get more frequent in certain cases such as near a planet. And while there are not many particles in any cubic metron of space, across a distance of a few planetary diameters or so, it adds up & acts similarly to how a room full of smoke acts on a laser pistol - scattering the laser and drastically reducing its energy.

So the hit LS8 took was pretty weak by the time it traveled all that distance.

In any case, the outer Turtle Shell of LS8, made of Superconducting ceramic, evenly distributed all the heat from the beam, in an instant, across its whole 90,321 cubic metrons of volume.

At pointblank range, a heavy anti-ship laser had about 500 times the energy a laser turret had - enough to raise 500 cubic metrons of iron by 3000 degrees thereby vaporizing it. Iron was just a common standard for measuring - such a laser would vaporize a significantly smaller volume of the advanced alloys which most ships were made of, and even less of a ship like Galactica, but it would still cause serious damage to just about anything. Though, with the heat evenly distributed among that much mass, it would only raise the temperature of the entire mass of a Liberty Ship's turtle shell by 16.6 degrees.

In this case, the range was not pointblank, and the weakened shot only raised the temperature by 2 degrees.

So it was an interesting footnote, but not enough to bother the Liberty Ship.

The shot was hardly noticed, except by the SnowRam on the surface of LS8 which was almost hit, whose occupants might need counseling later to get over the dramatic experience.

Meanwhile, the 400 Cylon Raiders that had followed the Vipers had attempted to dogfight while the Vipers were busy, but had run afoul of more mini- mines. That, plus laser rifle fire had chewed away at their numbers effectively until the Vipers were done with the Base Stars and could turn their full attention on the remaining Raiders.

It was an unequal fight in the Vipers' favor. Normally the Raiders would have run, but there was nowhere for them to run to - the only surviving Base Star had fled when it was damaged by the 36 ship-mounted Pulsars, and was already well outside their maximum flight range.

So they fought to the last fighter.

And while that was going on, the 547 Cylon Raiders which had flown to attack the ragtag fleet had met the first wave of mini-mines flung by 80 Artillery crawlers. That wave was 3840 mini-mines and was followed by another wave of the same size. Those killed distressingly few Cylons - mines were just too easy to shoot down, given any time to do so.

That had been anticipated, so the third volley from the artillery crawlers, and the last one they had time for, instead launched Solenite grenades with special contact-fuses. They could launch 12 Solenite grenades in place of each mini mine, for a total of 576 grenades per crawler, or 46,080 grenades between all 80 launchers.

The thought was that, though each was individually easy to shoot down, there were way too many to have time to shoot them all down.

It was an experiment, but the results proved the theory. 126 Cylon Raiders hit grenades and were disabled or significantly impaired.

The Cylons that made it through that met the fire from 488 laser turrets among miscellaneous ships, plus 400 more on Galactica, 336 among Destroyer Escorts, 120 among Frigates, 80 Training Vipers, 48 Recon Vipers, 125 SnowRams plus another dozen SnowRams on each Liberty Ship for a total of 305, 155 armed shuttles, 105 Bantams, 100 tripod lasers, and 1000 soldiers with laser rifles.

The web of laser fire which all those guns put up took out the remaining Cylons very quickly, though not before the Cylons got in hits on various ships.

Before it was all over, half a dozen Recon Vipers took off after the damaged Base Star which had fled.

It took a while for them to find it, and by then the Firebases and Destroyer Escorts had recharged their Pulsars. Those Pulsars volley fired at it again and finished it off, though once again it took all their saved up energy to do so.

With the battle over, everyone breathed a sigh of relief and got to work on repairs and recovery.

8 ragtag ships had been damaged and went on the urgent repair list. Hephaestus and Alfred's ships got right to work on them.


	20. Chapter 20

Chapter 20

As was traditional for them, nothing, not even a major battle with the Cylons, delayed an election.

Most of Sally's Reality TV Stars got eliminated after the first round, but Marie made it to the second round, and almost to the third.

Alfred and Sally were encouraged that someone with common sense and practical real-world made it that far, but disappointed that all 10 Councilors elected were, yet again, career politicians, one of them a particularly scary extremist.

Worse, their first act was to reaffirm that expansion and improvements of living quarters would remain the priority for all production coming from Hephaestus.

Their second act was to add a new entitlement program to it. They decreed a certain amount of production, to be continued indefinitely into the future, to go to production of cloth, especially for clothes but also for all the things people normally use cloth for.

Between that, and the housing expansion programs, they'd committed Hephaestus to working 115% of every day, which was, of course, not possible.

They didn't seem to care.

To them what mattered was promises that bought them votes.

Sure, cloth and living space were needed. But those needs were being met - barely. More would be nice, but staying alive was nice too.

If much less production had gone into building defenses, they may not have survived that last Cylon attack.

So while it would be great if everyone could have everything they needed to make them comfortable, their situation demanded toughing out some hardships a while longer.

The extremist, Councilwoman Xine, had campaigned on a platform of "Peace". This was disingenuous - nobody opposed real peace. But you could not have real peace when you were being attacked by an implacable foe. In such cases, it was fight, be enslaved, or die. And the Cylons did not enslave humans. Other races they enslaved sometimes, but humans were too disorderly for Cylon tastes, which is why they were intent on wiping out all humans.

So folks who voted for 'peace' thought they were voting for better lives, in whatever shape they imagined that meant. But the way Councilwoman Xine imagined it would have horrified most of them.

Once elected, and in private with other Councilors, she dropped the generalities. In public she kept things general, non-specific, and upbeat. But in private she made it clear that by Peace she meant surrender.

She was in favor of landing everyone on a suitable planet, destroying all their equipment and technology, dropping their ships into the sun, and living "simple lives".

She imagined, without any evidence of it, that this would placate the Cylons.

She made her opinions abundantly clear, again and again. She was very fervent and outspoken. She thought anybody who disagreed with her must be ignorant and uninformed - that if she just informed them, they'd be compelled to see it her way.

So she informed and informed and informed - when she wasn't verbally attacking someone she didn't like.

She didn't like Adama or Alfred.

One of the first things she said to them was "If you extremists had not provoked that 2-brained Cylon by not being present, the 10 Councilors it killed would be alive today!. You are murderers via passive-aggression. It's your fault we're still at war."

Nothing could shake her from her convictions, no matter how absurd they were. No facts moved her. No logic nor reason appealed to her. She was absolutely certain of all of her opinions, from the moment she formed them.

Though in public she showed great skill in the classic Politician's Skill - pretending to be wise, benevolent, personable, and reasonable.

One of her favorite rants was that anything and everything could be solved by negotiation. She believed she was one of the best negotiators ever.

Alfred started avoiding Council meetings, just to be away from her inflammatory rants. He and Adama traded off, each attending only the minimum number of meetings necessary, and sending in proxy votes with each-other the rest of the time.

After each meeting, Alfred concentrated on happier reports, such as the large numbers of formerly disabled people healed by growing new parts for them in the cloning tanks.

Some very skilled people were able to return to their duties that way.

"Unc!, we almost lost Starbuck...again."

"Hi Sally, tell me all about it." Alfred said, thinking he could use a break.

"He was on patrol and got hit, so had to make an emergency landing on a nearby planet. It turned out it had a human colony on it, as well as a small Cylon Outpost. The humans, including a group of children that Starbuck fell in with, had been fighting the Cylons in a guerrilla style war. That worked because the tropical heat and humidity kept most of the Cylon robot warriors rusty and down for repairs most of the time, and gave the humans plenty of foliage to hide in."

"So what happened then?" Alfred asked as Sally took a breath.

"Some humans got captured, then rescued when Starbuck led an attack on the Cylon Outpost. The few remaining Cylons escaped in a shuttle just before one of Galactica's shuttles rescued Starbuck. He came back carrying lots of diseases though - had to spend a while in the decontamination chamber. Apparently the planet Antila has lots of diseases - they even found, at the Cylon outpost, that disease had killed real live Cylons. All of them, in fact. The Cylons they had been fighting were all robots led by an advanced model of robot - an IL-series about as capable as a human in most ways."

"Interesting. I'd like to examine the Cylon robots damaged by humidity, as well as the other kind that died from disease. That, and we owe it to those folks, just because they're human, to give them what protection we can from the Cylons."

Sally agreed, and Alfred called Adama, because ships couldn't leave the fleet without an ok from the Council, unless they were on a military mission.

Commander Adama was the one who decided what was a military mission.

After a short discussion, Adama agreed that defending against the Cylons, via taking some pre-fab Planetary Pulsars, and volunteer crews to run them, to the planet Antila was a military mission.

So Alfred called for volunteers and was surprised by how many people wanted to go live on a jungle planet. Apparently living on an icy planet wasn't a very popular choice and jungles were far more appealing.

Almost the entire group of people they'd rescued from the prison planet Proteus were tired of living on ships. They missed living on a planet and jumped at the chance to go, as did many others.

So they scrambled to get everything arranged, then sent out 15 ships: 12 Liberty Ships stuffed with tools, equipment, pre-fab parts and all the people that wanted to stay on Antila, and 3 Destroyer Escorts to keep them safe.

Between all the equipment they were sending, Antila should become a thriving colony in no time.

And it should stay that way, given the 4 Planetary Pulsars, and all the anti-fighter defenses and sensor buoys, it would get.

The 3 DE's were to keep the group safe while it traveled there and back. They had, among the 36 Vipers they carried, 18 Recon Vipers, since knowing what was in the area was important.

If they spotted Cylons, they could call in fire support from the fleet's Pulsars or from the Planetary Pulsars on Tairac. That's what made them safe enough for Adama to risk the mission.

The mission went without incident. Apparently when the Cylons had abandoned their outpost on the planet, they had listed the planet as not being worth having. So none of their forces were spotted in the area.

Alfred's ships came back with disease samples, and with the bodies of Cylons that had been killed by disease - 9 single-brained Cylons and 2 2-brained ones. These were kept in Cryo-freeze so the diseases would neither die off nor spread, and could therefore be studied.

Cassiopeia, a med tech from Galactica, who was one of Sally's "Popular Kids" had gone along to make sure the disease samples and bodies were handled right. Deadly diseases were not to be trifled with, even though the humans of Antila had various ways to prevent and treat them.

She also came back with samples of, and seeds to grow more, medicinal plants used on Antila, which she'd gained experience with while helping treat people there.

And some people from Antila wanted to leave the planet and come with the fleet. They were allowed to do so, after passing through the decontamination chambers on the Destroyer Escorts to make sure they did not carry disease among the fleet.

The 3 Destroyer Escorts had returned with only 6 Recon Vipers, having left 12 for the planet to use in defending itself and scouting. These, again, were type 1a, so people could fly inside the Recon Vipers and gradually learn piloting thereby. Not that such experience would make them experts, nor fully qualified by most standards. But it would give them at least some minimum abilities for when the planet started producing its own Vipers.

They'd also left 6 shuttles, so the planet could emplace more Sensor Buoys as it built them.

There would be no impact to the fleet from leaving those behind, since, in the weeks while they were gone, Alfred had built many more.

They'd also commissioned pods 32-36 as Liberty Ships 15 through 19, with 2 making pre-Marron drives, 2 making Vipers, and one working on miscellaneous projects.

Pods 37 through 40 were almost halfway done already, and another 32 ragtag ships had been refitted with pre-Marron drives, laser turrets and Dockers.

But it wasn't enough - they were still using more tylium than they found.

They were not sure what to do to find more tylium, so while they did their best to think up more ideas on that subject, they continued as best they could - refitting ships as rapidly as possible to reduce usage, and scouting more aggressively than ever with Training Vipers, of which they'd built another 40.

In brighter news, Sally's expansion of her Reality TV shows was going well.

Sally, an excellent judge of people, had found another 11 people willing to be the stars of such shows. She'd also hired a bunch of folks to handle the day to day tasks for the shows. She was kept busy enough providing ideas and scouting out new potential stars.

Sally also reported that both of Starbuck's clones had joined the official Viper-pilot training programs run by Galactica. They certainly had the reflexes to be great pilots. Reflexes were coded for in DNA. Training wasn't, so they'd have to learn everything from the start.

Not long after Albert's 15 ships rejoined the fleet, there was another major Cylon attack.

As before, they'd been hiding in ambush behind cover. This time the cover was a gas giant planet, into whose atmosphere they had descended partway.

So scout patrols missed them and as the ragtag fleet passed the gas giant, the Cylons emerged and attacked.

It took a moment to be sure they were Cylons - there were no Base Stars, and of the several types of ships that were present, many had not been seen in hundreds of yahrens.

Humans had long speculated that the Cylons, when a ship became obsolete, did not scrap it but preserved it somewhere in case of future need. Cylon ships, as they became obsolete, simply disappeared from the front lines. Very rarely, they were seen again in really big battles.

But for this battle the Cylons had nothing but obsolete ships.

The Base Star, a ship with 2 big disks stacked on top of each-other and with a shared center, was their state of the art combat ship, combining anti-fighter weapons, anti-ship weapons, fighters and amazing durability.

None were present.

In the past, the Cylons had experimented with single disk ships, of various sizes, and with stacks of more than two disks.

Several examples of each were present.

They had 4 destroyers, which humans had nicknamed "pucks". Each was built in a single disk about a third the diameter of a Base Star. They were armed exclusively with heavy anti-ship weaponry, and came in 2 types. One type had 4 heavy anti-ship lasers and one type had 6 heavy anti-ship missile launchers. There were 2 of each in this group.

They had 5 Frigates, which were nicknamed "shell games" back when they were in common use, since each was made of a stack of 3 small disks, each a tenth the diameter of a Base Star. These were armed exclusively with laser turrets for anti-fighter work.

They had one Frigate, commonly called a "flashlight battery" which was built in a single disk an eighth the size of a Base Star, and which mounted two Pulsar weapons, as well as several laser turrets.

They had 2 really ancient cruisers, of a design not seen in almost a thousand yahrens, consisting of a stack of 2 disks each about half the diameter of a Base Star. They'd been retired when anti-fighter missiles ceased to be effective, and scanners showed these ships had not been updated - they still had vast numbers of anti-fighter missile launchers, whose ranks and ranks of launch tubes had earned them the nickname "pincushion".

And, still hiding in the atmosphere of the gas giant were two more ships. They had all been able to hide from general area-scans, in the magnetically charged, complex chemical stew that was the gas giant's atmosphere, but focused scans could easily detect them now that they knew where to look.

So the focused scanners showed and identified 2 huge "pancake stack" ships - a very old design the Cylons had used, where 5 disks, each the size of a Base Star, were stacked on top of each other.

These carried fighters - a whole lot of fighters: 1000 each.

But the Pucks, Shell Games, Flashlight Battery, Pincushions, and Pancake Stacks had all been retired from service for one reason or another, or sometimes several reasons.

The Pancake Stack fighter carriers were very slow to launch fighters, and had trouble coordinating that many. Plus they were poorly armored, didn't mount many guns of any type, and were very unwieldy generally.

The Pincushion cruisers were totally optimized for launching maximum numbers of anti-fighter missiles, which had ceased to be effective very early in the war, almost a thousand yahrens ago. They also moved slowly.

The Shell Game Frigates were very lightly armored, slow, un-maneuverable, and prone to breakdown if they tried to maneuver much.

The Flashlight Battery had been retired when the ship-based Pulsar weapon was judged and rejected.

And the Puck destroyers had almost never survived to get close enough to fire their weapons. The few times they had, they'd been destroyed shortly after firing.

The design just couldn't take the punishment necessary to do its job. It wasn't big enough to mount a surge circuit, like Galactica and Base Stars could and did, which threw so much energy, for one brief surge, into the ship's skintight forcefields, to almost completely prevent the damage from one hit by a heavy anti-ship weapon, though it often burned out the forcefields to do so.

Nor was the Puck big enough to carry sufficient armor.

Despite its obsolescence, the Cylon fleet could easily have taken on the Galactica & won by sheer numbers and firepower, if Galactica had been alone.

But production had not only continued, it had picked up the pace, with more Liberty Ships cranking out Vipers and other defense units.

Many of the ships that had been refitted with dockers were now using them, since Viper production was catching up.

So 148 Vipers launched from ragtag ships equipped with dockers, while 262 more launched from other ships and were joined by Galactica's 160. They sped to engage the enemy ships up close while the 72 Recon Vipers and 120 Training Vipers launched by the BattleSphere joined them.

No Vipers stayed back to defend the fleet this time. It was judged to be better, in this case, to keep them together to defeat the enemy fighters and hopefully keep the enemy ships with big guns away from the ragtag fleet.

The Vipers were still launching when the battle's first casualties occurred.

The 5 Firebases each fired their pulsars at a different "Shell Game" Frigate, aiming at the middle saucer weak-spot which was recorded in the WarBook - that encyclopedia of knowledge about warships, among other things.

The aggregate damage to each Shell Game was just over 1/12th of what it'd take to take out a Base Star. But while each of the 3 disks in a Shell Game was 1/10th the diameter of a Base Star, that made it about 1/1000th its volume, and consequently it couldn't take nearly 1/12th the damage a Base Star could.

So the middle disk on each Shell Game Frigate blew up, and the resulting cascading failures caused the upper and lower disks to blow up as well.

That's why they call that a 'weak spot'

At the same time, the 3 Destroyer Escorts fired their Pulsars at the Cylon "Flashlight Battery" Frigate. They didn't do quite enough damage between them to kill it, but a couple of the Firebases had a shot or two left & between it all, that was enough to blow up the Cylon Frigate.

But the Flashlight Battery Frigate didn't die before it got 8 hits in on its chosen target - the BattleSphere.

Every shot easily melted the snow it hit, then smashed and fragmented some of the BattleSphere's outer covering of Superconductor, via percussion from the rapidly moving mass of plasma, and tossed many of the bits outward, vaporizing as they flew because they had lots of heat and weren't in contact with any other superconductor to conduct it to.

But it's the nature of such hits to leave some gravel behind, pressed down by the force of the hit itself.

And each remaining bit of Superconductor gravel was touching other bits of superconductor gravel, which were touching others, and touching, eventually, large extents of superconductor that were still intact - not smashed into gravel.

Superconductor conducts with anything it is touching. So the heat of each blast was evenly spread around the entire volume of superconductor covering the BattleSphere, and only raised its temperature a few degrees.

Meanwhile the fleet had been racing away from the Cylons at the maximum speed they could manage. The plan was that either the Cylon ships would come out from behind the planet, to where the Planetary Pulsars on Tairac or Antila could shoot them, or that they'd be left behind - out of range and unable to fire.

But the ships could not run far enough quickly enough, unless the Vipers went in and delayed the Cylons.

The Frigates had represented almost all of the Cylons modern anti-fighter defenses except for their 2000 Raider fighters, so the 762 Vipers of all types flew on in, to take on the Raiders and the bigger Cylon ships.

The Pincushion cruisers fired vigorously, spewing anti-fighter missiles out in clouds of hundreds at a high rate. The Cylons had evidently updated their anti-fighter missiles, since they performed better than had been recorded in their last fights almost a thousand yahrens ago.

But the upgrades were not enough to make a difference.

It is ludicrously easy, if you have any time, to use a laser to shoot down anything that isn't dodging amazingly well. And while the missiles could dodge some, it was nowhere near well enough.

The 72 Recon Vipers between them had no trouble shooting down all the anti-fighter missiles as they got launched. Their CORA computers did computations so fast they effectively had all the time in the world for things like this.

While they were at it, the 18 Recon Vipers which carried a pair of small mines each, did as had been intended with that design - they dove in fast on the Pincushion cruisers, then released the mines at the last possible moment and hurried away.

The release was so close to the detonation that there was no time for most of them to be shot down.

A small mine has a blast radius of 100 metrons, wherein any fighter will be destroyed. It destroys missiles too, but that was besides the point, which was that it does significant damage to bigger ships as well.

The total damage from mines wasn't enough to kill the big armored ships, but it did damage them enough to significantly impair their ability to fight.

After that the Pincushions didn't last long, since any Viper which was nearby, and had a moment, strafed them, while still mainly paying attention to dog-fighting Raider fighters.

So the Puck destroyers and Pancake Stack carriers had to sit mostly idle while the human fighters fought the Cylon Raiders.

The fight took a while, but the Vipers won handily, as they always did when the odds were only a mere 3-1 against them.

When the huge dogfight was over, the Vipers turned their attention to the big "Pancake Stack" ships. They shot them up pretty good, but couldn't finish them off before they had to return to their ships to refuel.

The fight had been a long one.

And it had not been the only fight going. After the Vipers were fully committed, the ragtag fleet, fleeing to try to stay out of range of the Cylon's heavy anti-ship weapons, had passed by an innocent looking moon.

From that moon rose a surprise force of 300 more Cylon Raiders, apparently lurking there in case of just such an opportunity. They were engaged by a virtual forest of lasers, spread among the various ships.

But their tactic was unusual.

They did not strafe, maneuver, strafe and maneuver as usual - continually either shooting or setting up the next shots, all while trying hard not to be hit. Rather they maneuvered only enough to hit a target ship and try not to be hit on the way in. They strafed only the target they aimed for, and only incidentally. Their goal was to crash into their chosen target and detonate.

The pilotless version of Cylon Raiders had both a warhead, and the ability to act like regular fighters: maneuvering and strafing and dog-fighting only slightly less well than the piloted fighters. They mostly used them in the latter capacity, as additional regular fighters.

But this time they used them as guided missiles. And, as fighters do, they had excellent dodging capabilities, which made it possible for them to avoid being shot down.

Possible, but not probable - their downfall was that once they chose a target, they went straight for it, which limited their ability to dodge effectively.

They got shot down in droves by lasers. Some fell to Solenite grenades launched by artillery crawlers.

None got shot down by the Planetary Pulsars on Tairac or Antila, since they were mixed in among the ragtag fleet and any shots might hit a friendly ship.

18 got through and hit their targets, doing significant damage to various ships of the fleet. They'd concentrated on Galactica, and 4 of them hit her, doing moderate damage and starting massive fires in her port landing bay.

The fires were quickly and simply extinguished by turning off the forcefield across the landing bay entrance. All the air in the bay then rushed off into the vacuum of space. Since fire can't burn without air, that was the end of the fires.

The remaining 14 hits were spread among various ragtag ships.

Other special targets seemed to be the agricultural ships - several Raiders concentrated on each. All 3 were hit and damaged. One took several hits and was destroyed.

That part of the attack was as violent as it was brief. It started, ran it's course, and ended too quickly to affect the bigger battle by the gas giant.

The bigger battle ended, or rather paused, with the Vipers returning to refuel while only 4 Cylon ships remained - the 4 Puck destroyers, which were still huddled in the shadow of the gas giant, unable to come out, or the distant Planetary Pulsars would swat them easily.

The 2 Pancake Stack carriers had gradually sunk into the atmosphere of the Gas giant, too damaged to resist its pull. The gravity on that planet wasn't tremendous, but the ships had damaged power conduits and damaged engines and did not have enough motive power remaining to escape the modest 4 gravities the planet exerted.

The atmosphere of Gas Giants thickens as you descend, due to increasing atmospheric pressure. It can easily thicken to a point, down deep enough, where even dense things such as metal are less dense than the atmosphere. At such points, metal 'floats'.

Sensors showed that the 2 carriers had sunk down to a point where they floated, slowly being crushed by the tremendous atmospheric pressure.

The Vipers were still refueling when sensors showed the remaining Cylons aboard the 2 Pancake Stacks use shuttles to abandon their ships.

A few shuttles got crushed or corroded by the gas giant's atmosphere. Most circled the planet to break sensor contact and try to escape.

Tairac tried one shot from a Planetary Pulsar, just to see if it could hit one through the atmosphere. It was like trying to inject one liquid through another liquid - they mix too rapidly for there to be any real penetration.

So while the shot resulted in a nice pretty explosion in the upper atmosphere, it didn't bother the shuttles, moving lower down, at all. The explosion might have thrown them around and damaged them in a thinner atmosphere, like a habitable planet had, but not in this super-thick atmosphere.

So the Cylon shuttles made good their escape, at least for a time.

Councilwoman Xine demanded the Cylons be contacted and negotiated with. Several attempts to contact them were made, but they didn't respond - neither the shuttles nor the Puck destroyers.

While the fighters were rearming, there was plenty of discussion about tactics.

Just about nobody, except Councilwoman Xine, wanted to just leave and let the Cylons get away to fight another day. And she didn't have enough Council votes on this issue to get her way.

The Pucks had no anti-fighter defenses at all, which led to a suggestion by Malkex, the commander of Albert's soldiers.

He wanted to board and capture them.

He argued that the human fleet had no heavy anti-ship weapons except those on the Galactica, which couldn't be everywhere at once. He pointed out that the Cylons had tried to close and use heavy anti-ship weapons, they they may do so again, and that having more antiship weapons of their own could seriously help in such a situation if the Cylons tried it again, which seemed likely.

And he grinned when he pointed out that his soldiers had the capabilities to board and capture the Cylon destroyers.

Those destroyers had no anti-fighter defenses at all, and this situation formed a good demonstration for why the Cylons had eventually gone with an all-around design in the Base Star.

The enemy ships were helpless against a force of fighters or shuttles.

Malkex suggested sending in a wave of fighters, followed very closely by a group of shuttles.

The fighters would buzz around and distract the Cylons, concealing the real purpose of the attack long enough for the shuttles to maneuver in close, match speeds and board them.

They'd board in two ways.

Some shuttles would simply try to land in the enemy's shuttle bays. It was not expected that they'd be welcomed, so they may be damaged on landing, and would be heavily opposed, but it was worth a try, and would make a good distraction for the other shuttles.

The rest of the shuttles would fly within 100 metrons of the Cylon Destroyers, match velocities and fire harpoons like they'd done when assaulting Pulsar Mountain on Tairac. But there would be differences.

Pulsar mountain could not decide to move away & the ships could.

So the moment the harpoon, tipped with molecular binding pitons, made contact and bound, the whole 200 metron long rope, with 50 soldiers attached to the last 100 metrons of it, would be released by the shuttle. The shuttle would leave and the soldiers would climb the rope, up to the destroyer it was attached to, blow a hole through its hull, and board it.

Malkex asserted that it was well within the capabilities of his soldiers, so after some consideration, his plan was ok'ed.

Preparations were made, and efforts begun, both to help the damaged ships of the ragtag fleet, and to capture the 4 Cylon destroyers.

The fighters and shuttles launched, and quickly surrounded the 4 Cylon ships.

As they approached, the Cylons fired their heavy anti-ship lasers, on the slim chance they'd get a hit. But it was too easy to see where the big slow weapon was aiming, so the fighters and shuttles dodged easily.

While the Vipers buzzed around the destroyers, the shuttles went in.

3 went for each shuttle bay, and all made it in, though some got banged up in doing so, as the Cylons saw what was happening and wiggled the ship from side to side to try to prevent the landings.

But the wiggling mostly didn't bother the nice flexible ropes which the other shuttles flew by and harpooned them with. It didn't take long for a shuttle on a deceptive course - as if to fly past the Destroyer - to instead suddenly match speeds, fire the harpoons, release the string of soldiers & fly on.

The Cylons apparently never noticed it was happening.

In the confusion they'd deliberately created and maintained, one of the strings allocated to Puck 2 went instead to Puck 4, so instead of 2 strings each, Puck 2 got one and Puck 4 got 3.

So while the shuttles full of soldiers assaulted each shuttle bay from within, the strings of soldiers assaulted from without, by climbing their rope 'strings', blasting new entry portals through the hull, and moving through the ship to take the main Cylon resistance from behind.

Cylons are very orderly. They hate the independence and initiative which they see among humans.

So while a human ship would have most of its defenders work together while some were scattered all over the place, doing all kinds of various things, mostly independent and sometimes at cross purposes to each other, all the Cylons worked closely together. They all gathered to defend against the main threat they perceived - the attack on the shuttle bay.

The video of that attack, as recorded by 2 of Sally's Reality TV stars, was surreal.

Each shuttle, even as it was landing, set off multiple smoke bombs, and kept setting them off in series so that there was always plenty of smoke to degrade any lasers and reduce their power. The smoke was as thick as the humans could make it, but they didn't stop there.

They also set things up so that laser beams would be scattered and broken up as much as possible, by encasing each Solenite dart or grenade they used in bags of powdered glass.

And they used plenty of those darts and grenades, both to attack successfully through the smoke, and to fill the air with as much powdered glass as possible.

Laser beams traveling through smoke are significantly diminished. But laser beams traveling through clouds of powdered glass, with each bit acting as a tiny prism, disperse much of their energy as many tiny multicolored beams scattering all over.

So the whole shuttle bay was an amazing light-show of continual rainbows, with many of the individual light beams and sparkles retaining enough power to be quite bright despite the smoke.

The smoke and glass clouds varied in density, so some of the laser beams made it through to their targets with enough remaining energy to damage things.

But most were so weakened and diffuse, they did nothing more than provide an amazingly intense and chaotic light-show.

The humans could not keep up such a barrage forever, but while they did, they were able to find cover, advance to better positions, and weaken the Cylon force with every grenade or dart that found its target.

They'd also brought all the plasma pistols they had. There had only been 24 built so far, but all of them were distributed among the attacking soldiers and in constant use. Their pulses made it through the smoke unhindered in any way, and each one took down a Cylon.

They were starting to run low on smoke and glass-encased explosives when the rest of the soldiers - the ones delivered via harpoons and ropes - joined the fight, attacking the Cylons from behind.

Cylons do not deal well with surprise. On all 4 ships, the fight was over soon thereafter.

Humans in their place would have tried some last desperate gamble, but Cylons don't think that way. A desperate gamble would be disorderly and they hate disorder.

So all 4 Puck type destroyers were captured from the Cylons and taken under tow, at least until the humans learned how to crew them. They had a head start on that, from studying and crewing the captured Cylon freighters F105 and G12, but there was still much to learn.

When the Vipers broke off from circling the Pucks, they went after the escaped Cylon shuttles, found them soon enough, and destroyed them.

It was the Cylons who had insisted on a war of extermination. The humans would be foolish to pull their punches in such a situation. If they'd let them go, they'd just have to face them again.

Councilwoman Xine disagreed, of course, but by then it was done.


	21. Chapter 21

Chapter 21

Before the soldiers had even returned, they'd sent in a request for more plasma pistols, thermal-vision visors, and smoke generators. Alfred immediately approved it and scheduled production.

The next thing Alfred approved was an effort to recover the wrecks of the 2 "Pancake Stack" ships. Each constituted a vast amount of easily recoverable refined materials, if nothing else.

Lowering cables, tipped with extremely powerful electromagnets, down to the wrecks proved simple.

It was not so simple to pull them up to orbit.

In the end they solved it by having the 3 ships in the fleet which had the most spare engine capacity - LowBoy, the BattleSphere, and Fred the FRD, all tow at once, assisted by half a dozen Liberty Ships.

The long line of 9 connected ships succeeded by all working together, then did it again with the other Pancake Stack.

Once the 2 big wrecks were in orbit, further towing was easy, since it wasn't opposed by gravity any longer.

They examined the ships, determined they were not repairable, and commenced salvaging any usable parts, after which they would cut up the ships and use every component part as raw materials for building something else.

Some of it was put to use immediately, to repair Galactica and other damaged ships of the ragtag fleet.

In doing the repairs, the details of a crisis unfolded. All the agricultural ships had been hit and lost their crops. The 2 that had survived were repairable, but apparently nobody had thought to store spare seeds anywhere.

Alfred was amazed that there were not backup caches of seeds somewhere, but there weren't.

He had a few choice words to say about that, dwelling artfully on the topic of stupidity, and the magnitude of it revealed by 'keeping all their eggs in one basket' in a situation such as theirs, where attacks were frequent.

At least they wouldn't starve.

The food production of the tree levels and aquarium level of the BattleSphere, plus the 2 park ships, while very helpful, could not provide enough food to feed the whole fleet.

But there were now 23 ships with water levels acting as armor, fuel, and, most importantly at the moment, farms for algae, kelp, krill, shrimp and the like.

These were the 19 Liberty Ships, the BattleSphere, LowBoy's 2 pods, and Fred the FRD - counting it as only one even though it had its own water level, plus the water levels of its 12 built-in Liberty Ships.

The algae etc was edible as it was, though the people of the fleet didn't generally like it. So for the most part it had been pressed into cakes and used as feed for animals and fish.

And they'd had enough feed, so more recent water levels had mostly grown krill or shrimp, which most people preferred, even though it grew much slower than algae did.

But, with just a little scrambling to rearrange production, they could provide the whole fleet with kelp and algae cakes. It'd keep them alive, though a little hungry. And nutrition would suffer, as would, especially, enjoyment of meals.

So Alfred's people also instituted a search among all the seed and plant samples they had collected on Kobol, looking for anything that would fill their needs.

They hadn't spent much time on that to this point since, without serious amounts of space to grow them in, it'd be little more than an intellectual curiosity, and they'd had more urgent things to do.

For any suitable plants they found, it would take several generations of plants before they could get enough seeds to grow food crops. Accelerated growth would help significantly. Yet still, to speed up the process, they started growing what they could, of any specimens that looked promising, while investigations were still ongoing. Further study could be done as the plants grew. And they'd already have a small stock of seeds by the time they found a plant that would serve their purposes, assuming they did find at least one.

On hearing the bad news, Adama had immediately ordered a massive hunt for any planet they could find that had edible vegetation of suitable kinds.

Assuming they found anything, they'd need places to grow it in - ideally more than just the two repairable agricultural ships.

So Alfred had his techs re-evaluate what was salvageable on the wrecked Cylon carriers, with an eye towards possibly replacing the agricultural ship they'd lost.

They'd barely started salvage work on them so far, but it was enough to be familiar with what was there.

Soon they had a plan.

Of the 10 disks forming the two ships, 8 could be used - not as parts of ships in the normal sense, since they'd been too damaged, especially inside - but as something like enormous metal plates.

They would cut any usable disk free from the stack, then cut each disk in half to turn each disk into 2 'dishes' - big metal plates with a steady curve from the circumference all the way down to the middle.

Cutting the disks in half was the fastest way to get access to the insides, so they could remove, everything but the dish itself.

If they cleared off all the bits remaining from the Pancake Stack ship, and sealed up all the holes, they could end up with a simple yet large metal dish on which to build a new ship.

Several dishes actually - two per disk and 8 disks could be used this way.

It would be messy, especially clearing the complex and damaged bits, but Alfred's people had experience with this kind of work from cutting up the pyramid ship they'd found on Kobol. With the right tools, it could go quickly, especially if they used tricks like employing shuttles to yank free any bits they'd mostly detached.

They already had some of the right tools and making more would be easy, which they commenced to do without delay.

Until then, laser rifles set to emit very narrow, continuous beams, made very good cutting tools, and large numbers of soldiers were happy to help by using their laser rifles that way.

Alfred also got some of his folks started on making four more pods, 41 through 44, just to hold the salvaged materials, since the BattleSphere and the G12 freighter would not be able to hold it all.

To free up more space immediately, they moved the Cylon Raiders which they'd captured on Tairac, and on the G12 and F105 freighters. The captured Raiders had been stored ready for flight on the BattleSphere and on G12.

But they didn't need them ready for flight as much as they needed space, right now at least.

So instead they 'parked' them in rows in space, and built the new pods around them.

Pods 41-44 would remain, for a while, in a configuration similar to the Park ships - with hull and major floors, but only every other minor floor and no further interior finishings. That way they could store maximum cargo.

Cylon Raiders were only 13.6 by 7.5 metrons, so, when ranked front to back and side to side, 78 of them could fit on a single deck of a pod, or 84 if you turned each sideways first.

So they had all 600 odd Raiders put away quickly.

As they worked, the plans came together and details filled in.

Agricultural ships need, first and foremost, to be very big.

And it helps if their size is wide and flat, so they can get maximum growing area.

The dishes would serve nicely for that, once all the wreckage was cleared off them and they were cleaned up and any holes patched.

The disks from the Pancake Stacks were each 1800 metrons in diameter - 43% wider than Galactica was long.

They would be very suitable for farms, when suitably rebuilt.

The dishes would be cleared and patched, then pairs of dishes would be welded together to form disks again. These new disks would just be big hollow enclosures, ready to receive dirt, air, water and plants, plus the machinery necessary to support them.

Two new disks would be placed side to side, with one more in front and another in back, forming a large diamond shape with 4 disks.

They'd connect them with structural members and passageways, add engines to the rear and a bridge in front to control it, and then it could cease being towed and instead fly itself, though not very well at first, while they finished it.

To finish it they would need energizers, and systems to generate, circulate and/or recycle heat, water, air, and especially light - the usual shipboard support systems. It would need various and sundry other bits like other ships did, though a lot less than most, since almost all of their space would be used for growing plants.

They got to work, and soon discovered that there was way too much salvage to hold it all, even with the 4 new Pods.

If they melted most of it down into large blocks, it would take less space, but they'd still need more room for it all. So they started melting while looking for more options.

The right way to melt it down would involve sorting, forges, and molds.

The expedient way they used, involved only laser cutters to free big chunks of material, a shuttle to haul it a short distance to an empty spot in the vacuum of space away from any gravity source, and a low power laser to melt it into a blob. They kept up the process - melting more blobs while letting the previously melted blobs cool, then collected and stored the cooled and solidified blobs.

Many things got melted together which were better separated, but that was better than not having the materials at all. They'd have to refine and purify things later before they used them, but they had to do that with new materials they collected anyway.

Leaving blobs of molten metal hanging in space wouldn't have worked if the fleet was moving, but the fleet was temporarily immobile while making repairs.

For more space, they managed to work out a system where they stored large blobs of salvage in some of the disks, such that one new 4-disk Agriculture ships would stay partly filled with salvage while the other was fully prepared to be an agriculture ship.

Then, as they used up the salvage, the 2nd new 4 disk ship would clear out and be used for agriculture too.

Alfred was thinking of naming them simply agro ship 3 and 4, but he noticed that his workers were calling them "Four Seasons 1 and 2" in reference to their 4 disks. He had no problem going with that name instead.

Some of his workers had asked why the new farming ships would not have clear tops like the old ones had. They'd had it explained to them that, while greenhouses had big clear tops to let in the sunlight, out in space there wasn't enough sunlight to make a difference, so it wasn't needed - the plants would get all the light they needed from artificial sources. Plus it was faster, and stronger, to just use the solid metal disks they already had, rather than try to lay down, and support, vast new sheets of clear glass or ceramic.

While Alfred was working on that, Adama's search had found, not just a habitable world with suitable vegetation, but a small human colony.

People needed, and were used to, carbohydrates, especially grain - if they didn't get carbohydrates, they lost weight no matter what else they were eating. That was a bad thing, for anyone who wasn't fat. And fat was almost unknown in their society. Generations ago on Taura, there had been a period where many chemical food additives had been tried, and most people got fat as a result. But when the chemical experiments had gone away, so had the fat, and it hadn't come back since, with rare exceptions.

The people of the fleet were already feeling the lack of carbohydrates, and clamored for an immediate mission to go to that colony and trade for grain and other seeds.

They didn't need to clamor - there was plenty of motivation at all levels to take care of the problem.

But the noise they made did help motivate the Council to allow Alfred to send a Liberty Ship to the planet. It could land, load, and offload much much faster than a series of shuttles could.

And it would not be recognizable as a Colonial ship. For some reason the Council was very reticent to reveal the fleet's identity to the unknowns on the planet.

There had been some discussion on what to trade for the seeds they wanted, and energizers had been suggested. All small colonies needed more energy. Since Alfred had a bunch of these he'd made, it was easy to carry several along as trade goods.

And just in case energizers were not enough, it was decided to send a trained medical team as well, to trade medical care. No matter what, every group always needed more of that.

Cassiopeia from the Galactica headed that group. They all donned new Rayon clothes so their normal uniforms would not give away their identities, then set out.

It did not take long to get to the planet.

They left a couple Sensor Buoys in orbit, to give them warning of anything coming, then Liberty Ship 4 descended to the planet's surface.

They landed in an unused field near a town.

They'd planned to drive Bantam vehicles to town, but ended up not needing to - the town members had seen the ship landing and has come to them.

The planet was named Serenity, and the people there had a problem.

When the planet was settled, nobody had noticed the aliens living there. The aliens, named Boray, were like bipedal pigs and lived in caves. They were mostly quiescent, coming out and bingeing during the full moon, then semi-hibernating in their caves.

By the time the colony had discovered that, the ship they'd hired to bring them to the planet had already left.

So they were stuck.

It turned out that the Boray were violent, and the planet was covered with them.

The human colony on Serenity had steadily declined from the start, due to constant raids by the Boray.

The humans were tired of it.

They plead for help, were told to hang on a few centons, and the Council was called and consulted.

They deliberated.

Meanwhile, a brisk trade for all kinds of seeds, as well as bulk grain, proceeded - people tended to make the best of existing situations while hoping for better, so they traded now, while still hoping and asking for rescue.

Energizers did not trade as well as weapons, in this case.

And Cassiopeia got a lot of business too - she set up shop in town and helped any who needed medical aid.

Nobody expected a raid by the Boray, since the cycle of the moon wasn't right for it.

But apparently the large ship descending from the sky had looked similar enough to the new moon to rouse them.

They attacked the town.

Most of the town followed their usual habit of hunkering down during such attacks, while allowing the Boray steal what they wanted, in order to take as few losses as possible.

While they were rushing to protect themselves, they forgot to inform Cassiopeia, who stayed in her medical aid hut, and ended up being captured by the Boray.

They sometimes took captives for unknown reasons.

No captive ever returned.

The 200 soldiers who had come on Liberty Ship 4, in case of need, prepared to go rescue Cassiopeia, and the Council was duly informed of events.

The Council surprised everyone by forbidding a military rescue. Councilwoman Xine, supremely confident of her negotiating skills, insisted that she could placate the Boray and fix the situation, leaving both humans and Boray happy and living together in peace and contentment.

She wanted, and demanded, that the full Council go with her, for maximum negotiating effect.

Adama deferred, saying he would be derelict in his duty as military commander if he left the fleet and put himself at risk.

Xine reluctantly agreed, but redoubled her efforts to get the rest to go with her.

Alfred resisted.

While Xine was supremely confident of her abilities, Alfred was supremely confident that the Council was useless, had no common sense or connection with real-world practicalities due to living strictly in a world of ideas divorced from consequences, and would achieve nothing.

He plead urgency in working to finish new Agricultural ships, and stayed behind despite Xine's endless protests.

Somehow, Xine convinced the other 9 Councilors to go with her.

The 10 Councilors arrived in a shuttle, and landed near the Boray cave, where Cassiopeia was a captive. They approached with gifts, lots of friendly words, and no weapons.

They were immediately taken prisoner by the Boray.

That was enough for the soldiers, who immediately headed for the cave. They had been ordered by the Council not to rescue Cassiopeia, but had not been ordered not to rescue the Council.

That was all the excuse they needed.

They proceeded with a textbook assault on the cave, even though the Boray had no better weapons than spears.

With snipers covering the front of the cave, they used mining lasers to stealthily carve a new way in to the back of the cave.

They timed the completion of the new back entrance with a distraction - an explosion at the front.

When the explosion went off, the Boray turned their attention towards it and away from the new entrance simultaneously opening in the back of their cave.

The soldiers swarmed in the new entrance firing with abandon, since their lasers were set to stun. That way they saved time - not having to judge the validity of a target before firing. If they shot a friendly, no sweat - they'd wake up in an hour or so. And any enemies they shot were out of the fight and could be dealt with later, one way or another.

It was over almost immediately, but despite their speed, the soldiers had been too late.

The 10 Councilors were dead.

Cassiopeia had been saved alive by the Boray because she was useful to them while she was caring for their wounded, which she'd begun instinctively, when she first arrived and found sick and wounded Boray in the cave.

The Boray had not found the Councilors to be useful, but rather annoying, and had killed them soon after arrival.

Then they'd proceeded to butcher and eat them.

Though humans universally balked at eating another intelligent species, the Boray apparently had no qualms about it.

The soldiers had qualms about leaving man-eaters unpunished, who, when it came to it, were also murderers, kidnappers, vandals, and thieves, so they made sure justice was served, after getting Cassiopeia out of the cave.

Cassiopeia would need counseling to get over her experience, but was safe.

The Serene - what the inhabitants of Serenity called themselves, though they were anything but 'serene' as commonly defined - heard the story and redoubled their efforts to be evacuated from the planet.

Though they were armed now, they still didn't want to stay a moment longer on the "horrid pest-hole of a planet", as they called it.

It hadn't been hard for them to figure out that the one ship they saw was not the only one.

But it was the only one needed to carry the people away from their bad situation on the planet - their numbers were down to 2260.

With all the robbery and vandalism they'd been subjected to, they didn't have much in the way of goods, yet 'not much' is a relative term.

Liberty Ship 4 could carry all of them away when it left, but would have trouble packing in all the Serene, plus their goods, grain, and livestock animals.

So Liberty Ship 7 was sent as well, towing pod 45. LS 7 would carry their goods until they got settled among the fleet, and pod 45 would carry their animals.

The animals presented something of a problem.

The fleet's livery ships were already full of animals - they didn't need any more.

And although Pod 45 could hold them, they'd be packed in and unable to really thrive while there.

While doing so it wouldn't be much use for anything else.

Yet the livestock animals represented a large fraction of the Serene's wealth.

While they wanted off the planet, they didn't want to abandon any more of their wealth than was absolutely necessary.

That's how Alfred became a rancher, at least temporarily.

To resolve the issue quickly, he simply bought all the livestock, using vouchers for various amounts of production time. Once it was explained to the Serene, they were happy to get them - they didn't know, now, what they'd need while living aboard spaceships, but once they found out, they could use the vouchers to get it, whatever it turned out to be.

With that, the rest of the process moved very quickly, and the last humans left the planet the next day.

Alfred had only vague plans for what to do with the livestock. He'd just wanted the situation resolved quickly & so he had acted to make that happen.

He figured he'd let the livery ship managers look everything over and decide what to keep and what not to, then probably slaughter the rest for food, though not all at once.

Liberty Ships 4 and 7, with pod 45 and the new refugees, rejoined the fleet with the the new elections for Council already in progress.

Because they'd been gone for the first round of it, an infrequently used clause of the law was invoked, to allow write-in candidates to join the election at any time before it ended.

And as they returned, they resumed towing other ships - something that had recently been started to save fuel.

Every ship in the fleet with a pre-Marron drive was towing a Marron drive ship.

Tylium stocks had been diminishing for a long time. Even though 86 ships had been converted from Marron to pre-Marron drives, there were still 115 of the original ragtag fleet using Marron drives, plus the 6 Frigates, the 4 Puck-type Destroyers which they had not yet had time to convert to fusion-powered Kobold-designed reactionless drives, and a whole lot of new Vipers.

Towing them, were 86 ragtag ships, LowBoy, 19 Liberty Ships, pods 37-40 which were not complete ships yet, but had bridges and working engines, the BattleSphere Mousetrap, Fred the FRD, 5 Firebases, 3 Destroyer Escorts, 2 Scarab and 1 Sphinx ships they'd recovered on Kobol and refurbished, and the 2 Cylon-built freighters F105 and G12, which had had their original engines swapped for Kobold engines, though you couldn't tell by looking at them.

So every ship in the fleet had a ship available to tow it, with a couple to spare.

The Galactica was not towed.

It was too big for any one ship to handle towing and they didn't have enough ships currently available to try working together to tow it.

Not yet.

That being the case, they hadn't even asked Adama, yet, about towing his ship. He took pride in its speed and maneuverability and it would be hard for him to accept a tow.

Big battles, like the recent one, burned a lot of fuel, especially since they 'pulled out all the stops' with their Vipers, and used them all, to their maximum performance.

The massive scouting effort took fuel too.

Some fuel had been recovered with the wrecks of the Pancake Stack ships, and a continual trickle was found and recovered on comets and asteroids they passed. But it wasn't enough.

With towing and more engine conversions, they would be able to keep going, but their combat ability would plummet without tylium.

They needed their Vipers and Vipers needed tylium.

So they towed ships, to save every drop of tylium they could.


	22. Chapter 22

Chapter 22

Adama didn't say anything, but folks who knew him could easily tell he was very glad that Galactica was not being towed when BattleStar Pegasus showed up.

It would have looked undignified, and if there was one thing Adama excelled at, it was in being dignified.

Viper patrols from Galactica and Pegasus had found each-other, gone to Pegasus, exchanged information, and led Pegasus to Galactica and the ragtag fleet.

Information was called ahead, so as Pegasus arrived, she received a 2100 gun salute.

It was only a tiny token of how much joy and relief the people of the fleet felt at her arrival. There were also plans for huge parties, using the oldest and best of the ambrosia they'd recovered from Proteus.

Pegasus, under the legendary Commander Cain, had been thought to have been destroyed yahrens ago.

But the wily old warrior had been sustaining himself, his ship, and his crew, by raiding the Cylons.

Not many could manage a feat like that. Raiding the enemy for supplies, while you have no support base of your own, is extremely risky. But Cain was legendary for a reason - he was widely esteemed as the best military commander the 12 Colonies had ever produced.

And inherent in the job of any military commander was the ability to successfully asses risk. All war is inherently risky. Those military commanders who judge risk poorly either get rapidly killed, or take no risks yet achieve nothing.

So to have achieved what Cain had, even before the feat of keeping Pegasus alive for yahrens by raiding, clearly marked him as one of the best judges of risk ever seen - mere luck would have run out long ago.

He had other skills too. He was a master of maneuver and deception - keeping the enemy guessing about his intentions and off-balance, and hitting them where they were weak.

If other commanders could be compared to bare-knuckle brawlers - just moving in and slugging it out, with victory to the strongest and toughest - Cain could be compared to an expert martial artist - using finesse and skill to do things like turn incoming blows into joint locks and submission holds.

His crews had been known to say that he'd defeated more Cylons with his engines than with his lasers, because he was so adept at movements which placed the enemy either at a disadvantage in a fight, or lured some completely out of place so they could not participate in the real fight.

He'd even managed, a few times, to kill large groups of Cylon Raiders by leading them around until they ran out of fuel.

Cain and Adama had known each-other for yahrens, and they spent time on the comm catching up on each-others' news and situation reports while Pegasus approached the fleet.

And as soon as he could, Cain went via shuttle to Galactica to meet in person.

Normally such an illustrious figure, especially in circumstances like these, would have been met by the full Council.

But since elections to replace deceased Councilors were not yet complete, he met such of the Council as there was - Adama, who he would have met with anyway, and Alfred.

Upon being introduced to Alfred, Cain said to him:

"You don't look like a Councilman - wearing pants made of rabbit skins and a shirt made of draperies."

Alfred had heard that Cain was remarkably blunt and outspoken, so he took no offense, but remained stoic and replied "My other set of clothes is in the wash."

"You have 2 sets of clothes?"

"Yes, and a hammock - I'm rich." said Alfred, deadpan.

"You've built half a fleet, yet almost nothing for yourself?" Cain pressed.

"A man's got to have priorities."

"I like your priorities" Cain smiled.

They shook hands and Adama led them to his private briefing room for consultations, saying "I know there are many celebrations planned in honor of Cain and Pegasus, but they can wait a few moments longer while we sort out all the implications of our new circumstances."

As soon as they sat down, Cain volunteered "I see you're low on fuel - I know where there is plenty."

Adama replied "That is a concern - tell us what you have in mind."

Cain got up and started pacing as he spoke "There's a Cylon planet nearby called Gomoray - a major exporter of tylium. We're been raiding them for supplies and fuel for 2 yahrens. They've recently received massive reinforcements, but I've been preparing ambush sites, and with your forces at one of my ambush sites, we can do it again! We'll beat up their ships so we can take the fuel they're guarding!"

He gave some details of Cylon ship and fighter numbers, but stopped when Adama waved for silence.

Adama sighed. "Cain, you were always bold, but this...this is too risky - no, that phrase doesn't begin to cover it. Even the word 'reckless' falls well short. 'Foolhardy' may begin to approach it. Even with your skills, we'd lose our warships and then all of the fleet. No. Sorry, but I can't allow it."

"But we can win this battle!" Cain protested.

"I'm not interested in winning battles, I'm interested in saving lives." Adama insisted.

"Woah, hold on there" Alfred interjected "Did you even hear what you just said? It is not a choice between the two. Rather, because we are in a war - like it or not - it is only by winning battles that we will save lives. Losing battles certainly won't save lives, and running from battles, historically speaking, often costs more lives than losing them does."

"Fair enough" Adama conceded. "But not this battle - the risk is beyond belief. Some battles can be avoided and this is one such."

"How much fuel do you have?" Cain asked.

When Adama told him, Cain replied

"You can't avoid this battle - one way or another it will happen. Either you let me ambush them on prepared ground, or else the fleet that is chasing you will catch you. Probably out in the open and therefore at a disadvantage. In fact, they will probably be joined by ships from around Gomoray and the ones chasing me. In that case, our odds of surviving are really bad."

While Adama was thinking that over, Alfred chimed in

"Cain here is the recognized all-time master of his art. Just acknowledge the possibility that he knows what he is doing. If he were a master juggler, would you tell him it was foolhardy for him to juggle flaming knives, or would you accept that he has worked up to it and mastered the technique, so that what's foolhardy for anyone else is routine for him?"

"Acknowledged, but this..." Adama trailed off.

Alfred hastened to add

"Adama, you've been a good leader - exactly the leader we needed. But babysitting a bunch of helpless refugee ships requires a very different mindset than commanding a military operation. You've been the babysitter we needed, and immersed yourself in it so you did it very well. But you've done it so long, and so thoroughly, that you're now showing the mindset of a babysitter. Babysitters take no risks they can avoid. Military commanders take risks. In fact, since war is always risky, you could say that the core of a military commander's job is to judge which risks should be taken, and which ones avoided. Commander Cain still has very much the mindset of a military commander. What's more, he is widely acknowledged as the best there is, or ever has been. That means he is very good at judging what risks to take. Let him do what he does so well. Don't second-guess him, or pull the rug out from under him just because any-and-all risk looks bad to your current mindset."

Adama sighed "Ok, fine. Here's how it will be. Here and now we're forming Fleet one, and Fleet 2.

Fleet one is composed of Galactica, what we've been calling the 'ragtag fleet' - which is mostly the ships that escaped the 12 Colonies - and Alfred's ships.

Fleet two is Pegasus, plus any of Alfred's ships he is willing to give you."

Cain nodded as Adama continued

"We'll go back to classic leadership - I'll tell you what I want done & you figure out how to do it with your fleet, then execute your plan. I don't need to know the plan. In this case I don't want to know it. Just tell me what resources you need from me & do things your way. I won't joggle your elbow."

Cain nodded so deeply it was almost a bow, and Adama added.

"Get me the fuel I need, but limit your actions to whatever risk you judge to be safest."

"Yes sir!" Cain said enthusiastically, then turned to Alfred and said "What ships can you spare for me?"

"I built them to be used, not to hoard them up like some pretty baubles - take what you need".

In discussions, it came out that what Cain needed was all the warships - the Frigates, Destroyer Escorts, Firebases and captured Cylon Puck-type Destroyers and Raiders, plus the 2 captured Cylon freighters, named F105 and G12, plus enough replacement Vipers to bring him back up to full complement: he'd been down to 80.

He also asked if he could solicit volunteers on a couple ragtag ships.

He got approval, and, since the folks living in F105 wouldn't want to go into battle, the process of moving people from F105 to other ships was begun.

Then the celebrations would wait no longer - eager would-be party-goers had been incessantly knocking on the door and could be not be denied any longer.

The people of the fleet were ecstatic at having a second BattleStar - led by a military legend - join them.

They expressed that in more ways than just parties.

Cain got added as a write-in candidate for the elections for the Council of 12.

Even though those elections had already gotten down to the last 2 rounds, Cain won a seat - with the biggest proportion of votes of any of candidate.

Though other than Cain, all the newly elected Councilors were again career politicians, who kept all the same old policies in place.

It seemed that nothing Alfred could do was making much difference in that.

Sally, on the other hand, was making an impact. Though none of her Reality Stars won seats on the Council, several did very well in the elections.

One even made it to the final runoff before being beaten - she might have won if Cain hadn't been a candidate.

So there was hope for a better Council, eventually.

In the meantime, Alfred had work to do, including some special work that Cain wanted.

Cain had been in this area for 2 yahrens, and had not been twiddling his thumbs.

Raiding for fuel and supplies, and preparations for those raids, had taken up much of his time.

He'd mostly done that by hit and run tactics, using speed, maneuver, and decoys to lure defenders away from Gomoray, then have a small force of fighters and shuttles sweep in from another direction, smash any fixed defenses, and hurry to get fuel from the temporarily undefended base before the Cylon Raiders could return.

This had worked well, but, realizing that no one strategy would always work, Cain had spent the months in-between attacks preparing sites where he could ambush the Cylons.

He had found several star systems, with no outposts or inhabitants, but with lots of 'terrain', by which he meant asteroid belts and planets - especially gas giants with rings and complicated systems of multiple large moons.

In such terrain he could use the superior speed and maneuverability of the BattleStar Pegasus to 'divide and conquer' - maneuvering to split up enemy forces and take them on a bit at a time.

He called that "local superiority", meaning that, however many forces the enemy had total, you should split them up and fight just a small piece of their force at a time - pieces small enough for you to overpower - then disengage and repeat.

It worked even better if you could hit them with sudden unexpected violence - the more violent the better.

And he had done so to numerous groups of Cylon defenders over the yahrens.

His crew was now very experienced at such tactics, having been mostly using the complex and varied nebula that surrounded Gomoray to aid them. In several places, that nebula was thick enough to interfere with scanners, such that Pegasus could evade detection.

In most places, the nebula stopped pulsar shots, having just enough mass to pop their hyperspace bubbles, which was why Cain was preparing to fight, instead of just scouting out the Cylons and having Tairac shoot them with Pulsars.

In some places, the nebula was thick enough to prevent ships from using hyperspace bubbles. This allowed Pegasus to use her superior "Tactical speed" to escape.

Cylon Base Stars had a "Strategic speed" - or speed while in a hyperspace bubble - just as good as that of BattleStars.

But the "Tactical speed" - or speed while in "normal space" aka not in a hyperspace bubble - of a Base Star was significantly lower than that of a BattleStar.

So when being chased, Pegasus, by using the thick areas of the nebula, to limit both sides to Tactical speeds, had been able to leave any Base Stars behind.

Cylon Raiders could keep up with Pegasus, but they had limited fuel, so it was easy enough to break contact with them as well - as long as you got up to top speed the moment you detected them, or even anticipated them being present or nearby.

Acceleration takes time - more for some ships than others depending on their engines and available power, and definitely more the larger the ship was.

Fighters could accelerate quickly, but had no better top speed than Pegasus did. So as long as Pegasus wasn't caught going slow, she could escape fighters too.

So Pegasus had been chased many times, but always escaped.

And in these escapes, she had been careful to leave the Cylons some false clues.

Most ships could not operate without a base.

Cain had managed it, but the Cylons didn't know that.

So they assumed he had a base, and always had some ships out looking at likely places, to see if they could find Cain's base and attack it and him.

Cain was careful to leave them plenty of clues about where such a base might be, because it would be easier to ambush them if they had motivation to go to the ambush site, such as the suspicion that a hidden base was there.

Star systems inside nebulae tended to clear the nebula within the system. They tend to scoop up and assimilate all that dust & gas and so approximate a more normal vacuum, rather than the relatively gas-filled vacuum of a nebula.

But in the right kind of star system - one with complicated terrain - Cain could do even better than he could in a nebula.

Pegasus has previously spent months in each of several star systems, making careful systematic, exhaustive, and detailed maps of each system, such that, in those systems, all masses were known and plotted. This would help Pegasus calculate new hyperspace bubbles much more quickly - in those systems - and constituted a big part of why Cain called them 'ambush systems' - in those systems, he could fight at a big advantage, since he could use strategic speed more often and more quickly than any opponent could.

For one such site, which Cain had named the "Bushwhack system", Alfred had been asked to set up additional preparations.

That's where Cain planned to take on the Cylons so he could get the fuel Adama needed.

Cain's mind was dizzyingly complex. The battle would be too.

Alfred's part was to help prepare the Bushwhack system.

Liberty Ships 14, 19 and pod 37 headed out, and started setting things up at Bushwhack.

Pod 37 wasn't quite ready to be commissioned yet. It had functioning engines etc, but its manufacturing space and living space weren't yet finished or configured. But that meant it had more space for cargo. That cargo space was filled with heavy anti-ship missiles and with mines. Mostly the mines were full-sized, but they included some small mines too, and a few special mines - duplicates of dazzler mines they'd encountered at Carillon. Dazzler mines did not explode. Rather they emitted brief intense pulses in various spectra, including the visual, which were strong enough to briefly overload, and even damage, sensors, including people's eyes.

A dazzler mine burned itself out emitting that pulse, and so really only achieved anything in combination with other things, like minefields or attacks. So Alfred hadn't used them before, but they looked promising in this situation.

The 3 ships set up hidden sensor and communication emplacements, jammers for both communications and sensors, hidden broadcasters of certain special types, minefields, individual mines, more minefields, hidden missile emplacements, and 2 fake bases hidden just well enough to be believable and just poorly enough to be find-able. They had to be found to serve as decoys, after all.

Nobody would be at the bases during the battle, since they were meant to attract the Cylons but not result in real losses when they were found.

Up until the start of the battle, 3 squadrons of Vipers - as many as Adama felt could be spared - would be on a simple landing strip at fake base 2, along with 28 Recon Vipers. They would all launch when the battle started and not plan to return, since the base would inevitably get destroyed - instead the plan was that they would take turns refuelling from ships.

They emplaced some hidden missile emplacements at each fake base, and also left all their tripod lasers at one of the 2, and minefields near both, for a nice surprise for any visiting Cylons.

Tripod lasers were just equipment - they could afford to lose and replace them if it would help win the battle.

SnowRams and artillery crawlers, while they could be remote controlled, were judged to be too easy to detect, and therefore destroy. So they would not be used in the battle, which would be all about surprise and mobility, neither of which SnowRams nor crawlers had enough of.

The sensor emplacements were mostly emplaced in some asteroids and comets that had very eccentric orbits - they left the plane of the ecliptic and swung high over the system, or low under it.

That would give them a better view, and was unusual enough that they Cylons were not likely to expect it.

Each emplacement had plenty of passive sensors, which gave off no emissions and so were undetectable at any significant range.

The sensor emplacements also had several communication systems, including some which used lasers, because these were un-jammable.

Passive systems and lasers were not up to the usual standards for sensing and communicating, but they would provide some ability to do both when all the jammers were active.

There would also be scheduled moments when jamming would be dropped briefly and a few active sensor/communicator buoys went live. The human forces, knowing when to expect those moments, would get more use of them than the Cylons would.

The Cylons would still be able to catch glimpses of the human ships, but any ability, of which an enemy had significantly less than you did, was an advantage.

And they'd be backing up that advantage with several Recon Vipers.

The special broadcasters which they emplaced were for "sigint" purposes. Often when a ship couldn't be directly detected, "Signals Intelligence", or sigint, was used to find it. This was similar to hearing a car around a corner revving its engine - you can't see it, but you know that it is there and roughly where it is.

A sneaky person could record such sounds, play them back at some other place and time, and give you the idea there was a car nearby when actually there wasn't.

Vipers and BattleStars gave off detectable signals when using their communications systems, active scanners, weapons, pushing their engines for acceleration, and similar actions. These signals had been recorded and special broadcasters set up to generate the same kind of signals.

When hidden around the star system and activated from time to time, they could give the Cylons false ideas about where the human forces were.

The minefields took the longest to set up, since no mine was laid normally. Instead, each was hidden inside a chunk of rock, as if it was a very small asteroid. These were placed in groups, near the fake bases and also in each of Bushwhack's 3 asteroid belts, with additional individual mines here and there. They were command controlled, so that friendly ships could fly right past them without problem, then detonate on any pursuing ships.

Many of these fake asteroids were just big enough to hide a large mine. They were placed together and called a 'large minefield'.

Some asteroids were just barely big enough to hide a small mine. These too were placed with each-other and called 'small minefields'.

It was thought that once the Cylons met a large minefield or two and learned to fear and avoid them, they may still be tricked onto a small minefield, since the rocks were clearly too small to hold normal sized mines.

Individual mines were hidden in individual rocks, in the rings of any planet that had them, and in any other place that seemed likely to work.

Once the Cylons learned to fear and avoid asteroids, since they might contain mines, all asteroids would become very helpful terrain features - useful for controlling the movements of the Cylons to the humans' advantage.

The hidden missile bases were just as they'd done once before - launch tubes sized for heavy anti-ship missiles were drilled into suitable asteroids, and even into a couple of moons. Then missiles were put in the tubes, ready to launch when they got a firing order. The tubes were capped with rock, which would be blasted away by special small explosives when the launch order was received. Then all traces of activity were erased as best as possible, so the rocks wold look completely natural right up until they fired.

While Alfred's ships were completing the preparations in Bushwhack system, the BattleStar Pegasus and the 6 Frigates, assisted by Recon Vipers, were scouting and getting into their starting positions.

They wanted to find the right set of circumstances for starting things off.

First they located the military patrols around Gomoray, especially the ones on certain routes.

There were some close calls, as Recon Vipers got fired at by a Pulsar-equipped Cylon ship. But they were maneuverable enough to dodge the first 2 shots and then get into a thicker part of the nebula, which hid them well.

Pegasus got into position, then the Frigates and Recon Vipers went looking for non-military ships in certain places.

Gomoray was a busy system, with many ships constantly going back and forth between it and other Cylon systems, so finding some in the the right place didn't take long.

Then the Frigates attacked one such group. It was 2 small freighters and a larger one, escorted by a Cylon Patrol Boat. This was a disk 100 metrons across with 24 Raider fighters, but only 4 laser turrets.

The 6 Frigates with their 36 Vipers, and 120 laser turrets, swooped in on the Patrol Boat and its Raiders and took them out very quickly. Then they damaged the engines on all the freighters and made as if they were going to capture the freighters.

The nearest Cylon patrol, a Proto Base Star, responded. It fired its pulsars, of which it had one each on top and bottom instead of heavy anti-ship lasers. Other than that difference, it was effectively the same as the later model ship called a Base Star.

The pulsar shots were a useless gesture, since the nebula was thick enough there to pop the hyperspace bubbles around the Pulsar shots, after which the plasma didn't get much further before dispersing.

More importantly, the Proto Base Star launched all 300 of it's Raiders and then, since they'd have less than half their fuel remaining when they reached the Frigates' current location, the Proto Base Star followed them at its best speed.

That distance was no more a coincidence than were the relative locations of the freighters and Proto Base Star when the Frigates attacked - the humans had chosen the target, time, and location very carefully.

The Proto Base Star, in its hurry to get to where the freighters and Frigates were, and where it's Raiders were headed, passed right by a fairly innocuous-looking asteroid.

It looked innocuous only because Pegasus, landed on its surface, was doing its best to hide. It had turned off all the systems it could, to reduce energy emissions, while keeping its anti-ship weapons primed and ready to fire. There was normally a delay before anti-ship missiles could be fired, but in this case that would be eliminated - they'd already completed the steps that caused delay.

The Proto Base Star flew close by the asteroid, and Pegasus, landed so she'd face towards the enemy's rear as they passed, fired as soon as the Proto Base Star was in view, hitting her first with both heavy anti-ship lasers, then with 3 missiles, each of which do about twice the damage that the heavy anti-ship lasers do.

The Proto Base Star blew up spectacularly.

That was the cue for the Frigates to pull in their boarding shuttles, destroy the Cylon freighters they'd damaged, and flee.

Pegasus fled the other direction.

Both fleeting human groups dropped strings of communications-jamming buoys so the 300 Raiders could not call for help. The Raiders could possibly get to and destroy some of the buoys, but not all.

All 300 Cylon Raiders were left with no targets, and too little fuel to get anywhere. They would drift in space forever, unless somebody happened by and recovered them, by which time they would most likely be inert hunks of metal with no energy left.

Effectively, they were destroyed.

Cain's people called these "Fuel-Kills".

While the ring of patrols around Gomoray was temporarily broken, Pegasus hurried there.

The Frigates hurried towards Cylon rear areas, staying far away from other ships, to avoid detection, while carefully scouting shipping using Recon Vipers and their long-range sensors.

Pegasus hit Gomoray like lightning.

Her Vipers swept in and took out planetary defenses, both in orbit and on the planet's surface.

Then Pegasus used her heavy anti-ship missiles and lasers to bombard the planet's military base, where all the Cylon troops were housed.

The planet's fighter base was far enough around the planet so that it could not be hit at the same time.

Raider fighters started launching from it immediately.

Pegasus did not wait for them to arrive. She took off towards the Bushwhack system, recovering her Vipers as she went.

6000 Cylon Raiders followed her. At their top speed, they neither gained nor fell behind.

All Cylon ships in the area also moved to pursue Pegasus, gathering together as they went.

As soon as the Raiders had taken off, the Frigates struck, taking out another Cylon Patrol Boat and capturing the 2 loaded fuel tankers it was escorting.

The capture was simple - non-military ships were usually crewed by only 2-4 Cylons.

The shuttles which had carried over the Warriors who did the capturing, also carried over small crews.

Cain's crews had captured many Cylon tankers over the yahrens, and so they knew well how to fly them.

Tanker 1 and Tanker 2, formerly Cylon and now crewed by Cain's people, started immediately for certain rendezvous points

The Frigates escorted them for a while, then headed off to go raid the Cylon shipping.

The design goal of a Frigate was to achieve something similar to a Viper patrol, but with no range limits. Frigates could not dodge as well as Vipers, so could not really hope to take on large military ships with any chance of success. But they did just as well as Vipers in scouting, hunting Raiders or non-military ships, and they did better in performing some other missions. Frigates had their own shuttles, so could capture ships, investigate planets, retrieve certain things like out-fuel-Vipers, rescue downed pilots and so on.

Cains plans called for the Frigates to wreak havoc in the Cylons' rear areas while the Cylon combat fleets were busy.

Pegasus passed right through the Bushwhack system and kept going, as if she was trying, and not succeeding, to lose the Raiders from Gomoray. The minefields, fake bases and so on in the system remained silent and hidden while the cloud of Cylons passed through the system following Pegasus.

Just after passing thru the system, Pegasus started jamming communications.

Cain was very familiar with how far Cylon fighters could fly before they had to turn back for lack of fuel.

He had planned things out with that in mind, and so led them on a certain course.

And he was good at timing and coordination.

So, just before the Cylons would normally have turned back for Gomoray, a Cylon fuel tanker came into their scanning range, headed towards them from the area near Gomoray which the Cylons were likely to judge as being safe.

The Cylons, predictably, kept pursuing Pegasus, apparently presuming that more fuel had been sent to them.

They were unable to verify that, because of Pegasus' communications-jamming.

The pursuit continued a while longer, then, when it was certain that the Cylon Raiders would have nowhere near enough fuel left to get anywhere, the tanker, which was one that the Frigates had captured and crewed, broke off and fled.

It was still far enough away that the Raiders could not catch it.

Pegasus then began a series of turns such that if the Raiders followed it, they'd burn their remaining fuel quickly, and if they didn't, they'd lose contact quickly.

As usual for Cylons, once it was clear that they had insufficient fuel to get back to any base or refueling source, they cut all possible power and drifted. That gave them the maximum possible amount of time before the last bits of their power would drain away. They did so, in case a friendly ship should happen to come rescue them, which was unlikely, but the best chance they had.

Pegasus then got out of their scanner range and sped back to the Bushwhack system, dropping a string of communications-jamming buoys as she went, so the Raiders could not call for help.

Pegasus arrived in the Bushwhack system just before the first group of Cylon warships. This group was the 3 Base Stars that had been hunting the Pegasus in Gomoray's area for a long time.

They didn't know it yet, but now they were the ones being hunted.


	23. Chapter 23

Chapter 23, the Dance of the Pegasus

The sensors in the system let Pegasus know about the 3 Base Stars before she could have detected them herself.

She altered course to set up a later maneuver, then kept going towards the Cylon ships.

The moment her shipboard scanners would have detected the Base Stars, she turned sharply and headed towards Fake Base 1, on the 3rd moon of Bushwhack IV, a gas giant that was the 4th planet in the Bushwhack system.

Though to keep them guessing, she'd positioned herself such that Bushwhack IV and Bushwhack V were almost in-line with her, suggesting that either one might be her destination.

She also started jamming communications, to prevent this group from telling any other Cylons what to expect.

The 3 Base Stars launched 900 Raiders to pursue Pegasus, which fled past Bushwhack III, a barren rocky world, then across a large arc of the 1st asteroid belt, and towards Bushwhack IV.

They'd crossed asteroid belt 1 almost at a tangent to that belt, given their heading and the locations of the planets at the moment.

Pegasus and the Raiders threaded their way between the sparse flying rocks as they rushed towards Bushwhack IV.

Then, at the optimum moment, in a section where many small rocks were only about 1600 metrons apart on average, a hidden minefield detonated. The small rocks had been disguised mines, and there had been a lot of them.

Large mines have a blast radius of 1000 metrons, so many Raiders were caught in the radius of 2 mines at once. And even Raiders outside the nominal 1000 metrons frequently got hit by bits of rock acting as shrapnel.

The Raiders had not been expecting mines, and had been flying fairly close together for better mutual support assuming they caught up.

Only 134 of the 900 Raiders survived.

Pegasus kept 'fleeing' towards fake base 1, but launched 80 Vipers to take out the remaining Raiders. 80 was the number the Cylons 'knew' that Pegasus had left, and Cain didn't want to update their information prematurely.

The Vipers made short work of the Raiders, then fled as well. They made sure to stay well ahead of the Base Stars as they, too, headed towards fake base 1.

The Base Stars were therefore presented with a clear goal - apparently the human forces either sought refuge at base 1 or wanted to protect something that was there. Either way, that made it a target for the Cylons.

The 3 Base Stars headed straight for base 1, only swerving out of the way enough to avoid any mines that might remain in the minefield which had devastated their Raiders.

As Pegasus rounded the gas giant Bushwhack IV and angled towards Bushwhack V, the Cylon Base Stars lost track of her. It was not generally possible to see a ship on the other side of a planet. But she'd been headed the same place the Vipers were headed - base 1, so the Cylons continued on course towards that goal and the fleeing Vipers.

However Pegasus had not continued on a straight course, or anything like one. Instead she made as tight a circle as she could around the far side of Bushwhack IV, moving at top speed.

She came out from behind the planet just after the Base Stars had passed it.

Cain expected this result, having timed and plotted the Cylons' course carefully, so she was ready - her 12 anti-ship missiles were primed and ready to fire. She came out from behind the planet already in missile and laser range, and wasted no time in firing. She sent 4 missiles at each Base Star, and added in all the laser fire she could - both anti-ship and turreted lasers.

Cylons do not react well to surprise, and most of their weapons point only towards the front. So of the few laser turrets that could point to the rear, none were even done yet slewing around to the right facing, before Pegasus' missiles hit the 2 closest Base Stars and obliterated them.

The 3rd Base Star, furthest away from Pegasus, did manage to turn most of its laser turrets around and blast away at the incoming missiles. The range gave her some time to plot missile courses better, figure out their evasion patterns, and try to bracket them with fire, such that no matter how they dodged away from one blast, they'd be hit by another.

But still, her time was limited, and 2 missiles hit.

The 2 missile hits which the Base Star did receive, went about 2/3 of the way to destroying her and the blows staggered her and disrupted all her operations briefly.

Try throwing a punch a split second after receiving a punch which almost knocks you out & you'll get the idea. The Cylon ship was totally ineffective for a moment while she tried to recover.

And a moment was all Pegasus needed. Her heavy anti-ship lasers fired again, as did her laser turrets, and finished off the Base Star.

Briefly, the Bushwhack system was devoid of any Cylon forces.

Pegasus scrambled to reload her missiles tubes again and move herself and her Viper groups to advantageous positions before the next Cylon force arrived.

She had her cargo space crammed full of missile reloads. But even though reloading was possible, it took several centons to do.

And this next Cylon force, the one that had been chasing Galactica and the ragtag fleet, was much larger. The Cylons had gathered a ridiculously large number of ships, so they could corner Galactica and be sure of destroying her once and for all.

So, entering the Bushwhack system from the 'south' - which was an arbitrary designation for easier references - were 3 Base Stars, accompanied by 11 'Puck' type destroyers, 10 'Shell Game' type Frigates, 3 'Pincushion-a' type cruisers, 2 'Pancake Stack' type carriers and 2 'Short Stack' type carriers, and a Zorkaelian Battlecruiser.

The Short Stack type carrier was a heavily modified Pancake Stack design, where they managed to fix its problems with launching and controlling fighters. That made it a good ship to carry and operate the 800 Raider fighters it held. But they'd had to drop all armaments and the unwieldy 5th disc to do so. So the design ended up as 4 stacked discs, efficient, well armored but unarmed except with its 800 Raiders.

The Pincushion-a was a re-think of the Pincushion. In this variant, all the anti-fighter missile tubes had been replaced with lasers. It was a kludgy design, since the whole class had been designed for missiles and optimized around them. But though it was far less effective than a similarly sized ship designed for lasers, it was still far more effective with lasers than with missiles: anti-fighter missiles were just too easy to shoot down.

Additionally there were 14 'Cookie Cruisers', so nicknamed because it resembled a popular brand of cookie, with a large top and bottom layer and a thick layer of filling in-between them. So in a way it was a 3-stacked disc design, with the middle disc being of smaller diameter than the other 2, but also much thicker. Unlike the Shell Games, whose middle disc was a weak-spot, the middle disc on a Cookie Cruiser was actually a strong spot - very much the opposite of weak. While the whole ship was well-armored, the middle layer was more so. The ship was a bit more than 1/2 the diameter of a Base Star and mounted fully half the anti-ship and anti-fighter weapons a Base Star did. But to fit that many weapons on that size hull, sacrifices had to be made. So each Cookie Cruiser carried only 24 Raider fighters.

And lastly there was a Battlecruiser from the Zorkaelian Empire, which had been vanquished and assimilated by the Cylons a few hundred yahrens ago.

The Cylons had wiped out the Zorkaelians and taken whatever planets, equipment, and technology appealed to them, destroying the rest.

The Battlecruiser was the biggest ship the Zorkaelians had ever made, at 900 metrons long and shaped like a long thin wedge.

The Zorkaelians did not use fighters, and none could be housed on the Battlecruiser.

They didn't use lasers either.

Instead the Battlecruiser was absolutely festooned with rail-guns of all sizes.

Rail-guns accelerated metal projectiles to amazing speeds, but were generally less efficient than lasers - aiming was harder, shot flight time before impact was much longer, and the shots didn't hit any harder.

But the Zorkaelians had made them 'fully automatic', meaning they had a tremendous rate of fire, with each rail-gun spitting out dozens of shots per second. The Battlecruiser had so many small rail-guns that any missile or fighter close to it would simply die - there would be no place to dodge which was not already filled by rail-gun projectiles, and there were far too many projectiles shoot down a significant fraction of them.

The Battlecruiser's bigger rail-guns could batter most things to powder in very short order, with repeated hits from large projectiles.

The Cylons liked to use whatever was best for the situation, and the war with the Zorkaelians is when they'd retired the Pancake Stacks and Short Stacks and introduced the Pucks, since fighters didn't achieve much versus a hail of rail-gun fire, but the heavy anti-ship lasers that a Puck mounted out-ranged the big rail-guns and could take out Zorkaelian ships easily.

Missile-armed Pucks were an experiment that came after that war.

Against humans, the Cylons had judged the Base Star to be most effective, and mothballed everything else. It was a sign of determination, or perhaps desperation, that they had put so many older ships back into service.

As the Cylon fleet had approached the Bushwhack system, Pegasus had watched them via the long-range sensor buoys previously emplaced around the system, and pre-positioned herself.

She also counted ship types and numbers, and commenced what calculations she could for making Hyperspace bubbles when near such ships, both singly and in groups. She already had a complete map of all masses in the system, with copies of it already distributed to each human ship or fighter. That map would make it very quick and easy for her to make make new Hyperspace bubbles whenever she lost one, which happened when nearby masses changed in certain significant ways, like when approaching a planet or ship.

The presence nearby of Cylon ships wouldn't invalidate his system map - only introduce new factors that must also be solved for. And, to some degree, he could get a jump on solving them by making certain calculations now, which his expert and experienced navigators commenced to do.

If he'd been facing an individual ship, he could have completed calculations now, for every possible position and proximity. That many possible solutions took a lot of computer storage space, but could be done, given some time.

As it was, since he didn't know what groups, formations, or proximities the Cylon ships would be in when he was close to them, he could not complete calculations. But he could come close.

This would enable him to get to Strategic speeds, via Hyperspace bubbles, far more quickly than the Cylons, who would be stuck in Tactical speeds most of the time they fought in this star system - new Hyperspace calculations would take them that long.

When the Cylon fleet entered normal scanner range for a BattleStar, Pegasus acted as if she'd just detected them, commenced jamming, and turned and fled towards Bushwhack VIII, in the extreme 'North-East' of the Bushwhack system.

Pegasus herself, as well as the many hidden buoys, all worked on jamming both scanners and communications, though they did it on timers. A random list of times had been generated, from which several times had been selected and communicated to all human units. At those random times, all jamming would briefly cease. Each ship had audible timers set to warn them when a 'jamming window' was approaching so she could get into cover - behind a planet or something similar.

That way, when brief time-windows opened where there was no jamming, the human ships would not be visible to the Cylon ships, but the various scanner buoys scattered around the system would see the Cylon ships, wherever they were, and communicate the information to the human ships.

So most ships would be nearly blind most of the time, but some of the time the human ships, and only them, would get complete up-to-date information.

It wasn't perfect, but every possible edge helped.

The Cylons launched fighters as they gave chase to Pegasus.

From the southern edge of the system, where they'd started, to planet 8 at the northeastern edge of the system, was quite a long chase, at tactical speed.

The Cylon Raiders sped well out ahead of the Cylon ships. But they didn't let that worry them. They had plenty of confidence, given that there were 4836 of them - 2000 from the 2 Pancake Stacks, 1600 more from the 2 Short Stacks, 900 from the 3 Base Stars, and 336 from the 14 Cookie Cruisers.

The Cylon ships were all slower than the Raiders, with some ships slower than others. At first small gaps opened between the faster ships and the slower ships. Then the gaps steadily widened, as each ship kept up top speed to try to try to prevent Pegasus from getting away again.

They had no hope of catching Pegasus in a 'stern chase' but kept chasing anyway, just in case.

Two of several possible reasons to follow were that maybe Pegasus would stop at planet 8, as it appeared it would, or in case it left the system and they could follow at their strategic speed, in hyperspace bubbles.

As the Cylon fleet passed the southern edge of asteroid belt 3, then belt 2, then approached asteroid belt 1, it got significantly strung out. The Raiders were far ahead of it, near Bushwhack II, with Pegasus far ahead of them and clumps of Cylon ships strung out well behind them.

Pegasus had passed Bushwhack II, then through the north edge of asteroid belts 1 and 2.

Then she turned on one of the sigint buoys beyond Bushwhack VIII. It was set to broadcast signals that looked like Pegasus, so it would look like Pegasus was hiding near that planet.

But in fact Pegasus engaged Strategic Speed, and followed the circumference of asteroid belt 2 from northeast to southeast at a speed thousands of times faster than the Cylons were moving. She kept as close to it as she could without getting her Hyperspace bubble popped, since the dense belt provided good cover.

She then sped through asteroid belts 2 and 3, coming out of belt three just after the last, slowest, clump of Cylon ships had.

From the Cylon perspective, the BattleStar they'd been pursuing was now suddenly pursuing them.

They didn't get long to think about that. Pegasus fired the moment she was in range of the lagging ships.

The Cylon Pincushion-a's and Shell Games were about equal to each other in being the slowest in their fleet.

Pegasus' sudden appearance caught them before they could even bring their weapons to bear.

The BattleStar mounted 12 heavy anti-ship missiles, 2 heavy anti-ship lasers, and 400 laser turrets intended for anti-fighter work. She devoted 2 anti-ship missiles to each Pincushion-a, 1 anti-ship missile to each of 6 Shell Games, one anti-ship laser each to two more shell games, and all possible laser turrets to the 9th Shell Game.

Cain's gunners knew the weak-spots and were very good at hitting them, but that wasn't needed with such light ships. All the targeted Pincushions and Shell Games exploded.

The 10th Shell Game - the furthest from Pegasus - was briefly hidden by the explosions and took the opportunity to speed away from Pegasus.

Pegasus turned and fled towards Bushwhack VI, in the southwest of the system, before the next nearest clump of Cylon ships, the 3 Base Stars, could get in range.

As she did so, a 'jamming window' opened, enabling all the Cylons to see where she was headed.

They all turned and gave chase.

But the jamming window had also enabled accurate scans of the Cylons to be sent to the 5 Firebase ships and 3 Destroyer Escorts lurking out beyond Bushwhack IV in the North-West of the system.

All of these fired at the Zorkaelian Battlecruiser, doing, between them all, a little more than a third the damage it would take to kill it.

The Cylons were very true to their standards, one of which was that damaged ships should disengage to go get repaired and fight again another day.

So the Zorkaelian Battlecruiser obediently turned and left the system, headed for Gomoray and the repair bases there.

The Cylons broke off some ships to go investigate Bushwhack IV, where the Pulsar fire had seemed to originate, while the main group and all the Raiders turned to continue chasing Pegasus, now heading towards Bushwhack VI & no longer towards Bushwhack VIII.

Cain designated the groups of Cylon ships as P1, headed for Pegasus, and B1, headed towards fake base 1 on Bushwhack IV.

Cylon group B1 consisted of 1 Base Star, 2 Cookie Cruisers, and 3 Puck type destroyers - sufficient to kill any base easily, and Pegasus at the same time if it came to it.

All the other Cylon ships stayed in group P1.

Immediately after firing, the Firebases and Destroyer Escorts moved, at Strategic Speed, well out of the system and then back in to useful ambush positions - the Firebases together and near planet IX in the outer system, and the DE's separate, near 3 different gas giants inside the system.

The Destroyer Escorts also launched all their Vipers, for them to sneak their way to other ambush positions. This was 4 more each than their usual 12, since they had left behind their shuttles for this battle. In place of each shuttle, 2 Vipers could fit. So 48 Vipers, 8 of them Recon Vipers, launched from the 3 ships.

The Cylon Raiders, still all in one group, gained a bit on Pegasus, since they took the direct route between where they were and Planet VI, and that route was shorter than following Pegasus directly.

But in doing so they crossed the south edge of asteroid belt 1 again, and encountered a minefield there.

When not engaged in strafing or dog-fighting, Cylon Raiders liked to fly along in nice orderly lines one after another with a nice even spacing of 4 Raider-lengths between them.

They often had two or more lines flying next to each-other with a gap of 2 Raider-widths in between lines.

Oddly, while this pattern formed a grid in 2 dimensions, they never extended it to the third dimension.

Still, a single standard mine, with a 1000 metron blast radius would, if it went off with optimal placement in a large grid of Raiders, destroy 642 of them.

It was almost unheard-of to get such an optimal placement.

And they didn't get it this time.

But, between all the mines in the field, they did take out 964 Raiders.

The Raiders immediately split into several smaller groups, all still chasing Pegasus, and with enough separation between groups to protect against mines.

A Short Stack carrier also split off from Cylon Ship group P1 and headed back to Gomoray, presumably to go get replacement fighters - since it was no longer needed in the Bushwhack system, being unarmed and without fighters.

As the Short Stack turned to leave the system, several distractions occurred.

The 3 fastest civilian ships from the ragtag fleet, having volunteered to help Cain, had come to the Bushwhack system and hid, awaiting the signal to flee. Their whole job was to flee at top speed, so that some Cylons would split off to chase them. They were fast enough to not be caught: two were former racing yachts, named Grasschopper and Frog of the North, while the ship named Rhideras was a former priority package delivery vessel.

Both racing yachts fled from fake base one on the 3rd moon of Bushwhack IV, and Rhideras fled from fake base 2, on the 2nd moon of Bushwhack VII.

At the same time, fake base 2 launched all its Vipers. The 120 standard Vipers fled in all directions, in groups of 20, as if trying to save themselves from certain destruction. The 28 Recon Vipers did similarly, but fled individually in 28 different directions.

None of them fled the system, but rather fled from cover to cover, moving rapidly to a planet, moon, planetary ring, or part of an asteroid belt, hiding behind it for a variable amount of time, then moving again, sometimes all the way across the system.

They movements were designed to be as chaotic as possible.

While the Vipers were doing that, Pegasus was doing similarly - zipping from one point to another, avoiding Cylon ships and groups and, in combination with sigint buoys, confusing them greatly as to where exactly she really was.

But though the Cylons did not know for certain where Pegasus or the Viper groups were, they did know where fake bases 1 and 2 were.

They had already split off a group of ships to go after fake base 1, now they split off a group to go after fake base 2.

This got designated Cylon Group B2, and had the same makeup as group B1: 1 Base Star, 2 Cookie Cruisers, and 3 Puck type destroyers.

The Cylons also sent groups of 300 Raiders each after the 3 ragtag ships, which were fleeing in 3 directions. 300 was far more than needed to kill individual unarmed ships, but where would those ships flee to, but the ragtag fleet? So the Cylons sent groups big enough to attack that fleet if it should be found.

Then the remaining Raiders, not having been able to catch Pegasus, changed tactics and split into groups of 100 and groups of 12: 100 to hunt the groups of 20 Vipers, and 12 to hunt the individual Recon Vipers.

Such scattering would also give them a much better chance of having a few Raiders in the right place whenever Pegasus showed up. A few Raiders would die versus Pegasus, but could slow it down long enough to be caught by the big Cylon ships.

While they were splitting up to find and destroy the elusive humans, 8 Recon Vipers, type 2c with the full-powered lasers, chased down the Short Stack that had left for Gomoray to get replacement Raiders. The Recon Vipers had no trouble chasing it down and strafing it, but could not destroy it in the time they had.

If they stayed at it too long, they'd get too far from the Bushwhack system to return.

So they blasted away at the Short Stack for a while, damaging it, then returned to Bushwhack.

The Short Stack continued on, still headed for Gomoray, though probably, now, to land and get repaired there.

The thinking was that if it went down for repairs, it couldn't return to the fight with more fighters before the fight was over.

The Recon Vipers, having burned extra fuel to catch the Short Stack, went towards the 5th moon of Bushwhack V, where a Destroyer Escort was hiding. On the way there, they engaged and destroyed a group of 12 Raiders that was out hunting for them.

Then they rendezvoused with the DE, landed and refueled. They were not out of fuel yet by any means. But the plan was to have the DE's top off the Vipers as often as possible, so that when the Raiders started running low of fuel, most of the Vipers of all kinds would still have usable amounts.

A group of 100 Raiders had seen the Recon Vipers go to the 5th moon, and followed them.

But when they got there, they discovered, not the 8 Vipers they'd seen, nor even the 20 Vipers they'd been hunting. They found instead their 20 Vipers, with 20 more, plus a Destroyer Escort.

The 100 Cylon Raiders died quickly, and the humans fled in 3 directions - with the DE and 2 groups of 20 Vipers each headed in a different direction.

Sigint buoys were now working overtime, broadcasting false signals about the locations of all human ships.

Cylon Raiders zipped from place to place, seeking human ships or fighters.

Most of the time, they found nothing.

Some of the time, they found far more than they expected, and got attacked and wiped out.

The humans took full advantage of the 'jamming windows' to give the Cylons clues to chase and set up ambushes, where more Vipers had gathered than the Raiders expected to find.

And some of the time, the Raiders found a Destroyer Escort as well.

After a few such ambushes, the Cylons split off some ships to go hunt the DE's specifically. They split off 2 such groups, probably since they'd never seen more than 2 DE's at a time.

Cylon Groups D1 and D2 split off from group P1 and headed towards the last suspected positions of the DE's.

Group D1 contained 1 Base Star, 2 Cookie Cruisers, and 2 Pucks.

Group D2 contained 3 Cookie Cruisers, and 2 Pucks.

Each was clearly intended to be able to easily take on anything it met - whether a DE, the Pegasus, or both, with or without Vipers helping.

At the same time the Short Stack and both Pancake Stacks gave up the chase and headed to an area near the center of the system where there was no cover anywhere near them. Being far away from cover, it would be hard to ambush them, and that was apparently what they sought.

They could not help much in a fight, being unarmed, or, in the case of the Pancake Stacks, poorly armed. Escorting them were the last Shell Game Frigate and a Puck destroyer.

This group got designated C1

Meanwhile, Cylon ship groups B1 and B2 had arrived at fake bases 1 and 2.

Both fake bases had been constructed with the minimal effort necessary to make them look like hidden facilities.

A series of fake buildings had been 'constructed' by means of digging building-sized holes, roofing them with sheet metal, then burying the roofs except for small 'doors'. The 'doors' were doorway sized and shaped, and had 'access' to them in between mounds of dirt to either side as if to conceal them. The mounds of dirt zigzagged as if to protect the doors from nearby explosions.

From orbit, they'd look to most scaners like actual buried buildings.

In the pits had been placed some miscellaneous metal salvage - mostly internal materials from the Pancake Stacks they'd gutted to make the new agricultural ships - so certain kinds of scans could believe they'd detected 'equipment' in the base.

LandRams had then been driven to and from most of the fake buildings so that vehicle tracks would be left behind.

Each fake base had a small cluster of fake buildings, then a series of additional fake buildings at increasing distances from the cluster. These were to encourage the Cylons to keep looking for additional hidden buildings, and thereby waste as much time as possible.

Fake base 2 also had a big landing strip where the Vipers had been pre-positioned, refueled in place by shuttles & then sat idle waiting for their part in the battle to start. The landing strip was nothing but a large flat space they could take off from, but to make it more believable, there was a very large fake building at the end, that was a good imitation of a buried and hidden hangar.

Halfway around the moon that housed fake base 2, the tripod lasers were positioned in a small ravine, ready to shoot at any Raiders that came by. It had been decided not to have them right at the fake base, since that was expected to be hit by overwhelming force. They didn't want to lose the tripod lasers for nothing - before they could get a chance to take a few Raiders with them.

Each fake base also had, in likely places, minefields and individual mines, and nearby asteroids or moons setup to fire anti-ship missiles, which, for simplicity, they were calling 'asteroid missiles'.

Cylon group B1 arrived at base 1 slightly earlier than group B2 arrived at base 2. Each was accompanied by 2 groups of 100 Raiders each.

The Cylon ships approached cautiously, scanning as best they could in the heavy jamming. The Raiders flew ahead to scout. This was anticipated. The Cylons habits and procedures were well known, and the terrain didn't leave them too many options for where to go.

So it should be no surprise that each group of Raiders hit mines.

Of the 400 Raiders, 257 were destroyed by mines.

The remaining Raiders withdrew to avoid any additional mines that may be there. The ship groups were perfectly capable of destroying the bases without help fro Raiders.

It wasn't too long before the Cylons spotted the vehicle tracks and the obviously man-made zigzagging mounts of dirt at 'building entrances'.

They wasted no time in blasting what they saw with heavy anti-ship lasers.

Dirt, rock, and bits of metal fountained into the sky as the lasers took out the fake buildings.

But that was the signal for the anti-ship missiles the humans had dug into asteroids and moons. These were in clusters of 3 missiles, since 3 was enough to take out a Base Star, and they couldn't be sure what targets would be available in each case.

Four such 'asteroid missile' sites had been set up around each fake base, distributed enough to make it likely some Cylons would be hit no matter what their formation was.

All the misiles launched, and at each fake base, 2 ships were hit and destroyed: a Base Star and a Puck at base 1, and a Cookie Cruiser and a puck at base 2.

The rest of the missiles missed, having not been in quite the right positions, given the way the Cylons ended up deploying.

Each Cylon ship group responded with a barrage of heavy weapons at any nearby asteroid or moon. After keeping that up for quite some time, they then resumed the search to make sure they'd destroyed every bit of the bases they were after.

Meanwhile, a system-wide game of 'tag' was playing out, where Vipers, Destroyer Escorts, and Pegasus, would flee from Cylons, almost always avoiding contact in a continuous and complicated chase, yet sometimes grouping, turning, and ambushing their pursuers, then scattering and fleeing again.

They could do this because they could get up to Strategic Speed much much faster than the Cylons could, due to their complete map of the star system.

Even the Destroyer Escorts had no problem fleeing, despite that fact that they were slower in each category - their Strategic speed was less than that of the Cylons, as was their Tactical speed. Yet they had no trouble fleeing, because their Strategic speed was much faster - thousands of times faster, than the Cylons' Tactical speed. That was true for any ship - speeds in Hyperspace bubbles were thousands of times faster than speeds outside them.

So the Destroyer Escorts, and the other human ships, abused this advantage for all it was worth, zipping from point to point in the Bushwhack system, leaving behind the Cylons with ease.

Though they were confused and scattered, the Cylons never gave up the chase. This was a defining racial characteristic for them.

The chase went on for an extended period of time.

Any time the Vipers could arrange an advantage, they struck. Many patrols of 12 Raiders racing around trying to corner Recon Vipers, died when suddenly jumped by groups of 20 Vipers. A few similarly died to surprise appearances by Destroyer Escorts, or even Pegasus, though Pegasus was mostly concerned with keeping the Cylon ships busy chasing her.

Once, a group of 20 Vipers managed to lead 100 Raiders around a moon and into the range of a Dazzler mine on its surface. The Vipers, knowing the mine was there, briefly turned off their own sensors at the right moment to spare them from overload damage, and closed their eyes. Even with their eyes closed, they could tell when the Dazzler when off - the super-bright lights that accompanied other forms of Dazzler jamming were visible through closed eyelids. The moment the mine turned off, the Vipers turned on their sensors again and wiped out the 100 blind Raiders that had been pursuing them only moments before.

Many times, a group of Raiders would be allowed to approach a group of Vipers, as if the Vipers could not escape in time, and, while their attention was fixed on the Vipers before them, a Recon Viper type 2a - the kind that carried 2 small mines - would do 'dive bombing runs' where they would zip up behind the Raiders release a mine, turn sharply to the side and release the other mine, then detonate them when she'd cleared the minimum safe distance. The Raiders could not shoot what was behind them, but turning & thereby showing their backs to the group of Vipers was even more risky than ignoring the single Recon Viper.

In the Raiders' usual formation, such a 'dive bombing run' could easily take out 32 of the 100 Raiders.

The mines rarely actually got that many, but they did chip away at the Raiders' numbers and set them up for sudden reversals, like when a hidden group of 20 more Vipers would suddenly join the first 20 and take out the remaining 75 or 80 Raiders. Sometimes it'd be a Destroyer Escort instead of additional Vipers.

And 3 times they managed to execute the tactic near the hidden tripod lasers on Bushwhack VII's 2nd moon - near enough for the tripod lasers to help take out the Raiders.

After the third time though, the Cylons managed to get a message out - jamming was variable like that - and 2 more Raider groups went and destroyed the tripod lasers, which nevertheless managed to take 44 more Raiders with them as they 'died'.

Between scouting, surprise strafing runs, and ambush-assistance such as this, all of the Recon Vipers were kept busy, but most especially the Type 2a mine-armed ones.

While all the Vipers, in groups of 12 as opportunities arose, were taking turns landing on Destroyer Escorts, refueling and relaunching, often with a sandwich in the pilot's hand, the Type 2a's had to do so most frequently, to keep them reloaded with the mines they were using up so fast.

They did frequent 'dive bombing runs' and also placed new mines in places where the Cylons were likely to be surprised by them.

One good example of such a place was in the expanding clouds of hot metal ions which used to be ships or groups of fighters. It was hard to scan anything in or through such a cloud in any case, and the jamming made it effectively impossible.

Consequently these sites were great places to hide and ambush the Cylons. Raiders could chase the Vipers into such clouds and risk getting ambushed if anything was lurking there, or go around them, which was slower and guaranteed the Vipers would get away.

But before any Viper had used the clouds for such tactics, Pegasus had done so while it was still a surprise.

As soon as her missile tubes had been reloaded after she ambushed the lagging Cylon ships, she rushed to Bushwhack VII, taking a roundabout and confusing route as always.

Cylon groups P1 and B2 were each in the area of Planet VII, though not together - B2 was still hunting and blasting bits of fake base on the 2nd moon while P1 was checking the planet's ring system for Pegasus, where some sigint broadcasts had indicated she might be hiding.

The ring system extended right up next to moon 2, but group P1 was currently checking the portion of the ring partway on the other side of the planet from that moon.

Pegasus' attack was quick and brutal.

With excellent timing and consummate navigation skill, she went at top speed straight through the cloud of hot metal ions that used to be a Base Star, surprising the 5 Cookie Cruisers currently comprising Cylon group p1, and sent a wave of missiles into them before they could turn. Every Cookie Cruiser got 2 missiles fired at it, and two got an additional missile, to make sure. The furthest Cookie Cruiser also received all Pegasus' laser fire, just in case she happened to shoot down a missile or two.

A Cookie Cruiser could survive one missile hit, but not two. All 5 cruisers exploded.

Pegasus didn't even slow down, but fled the scene as fast as she could - resuming her former tactics of avoiding Cylons and confusing them as to where she might be - while she reloaded her missile tubes again.

She fled and kept fleeing, because almost every Cylon ship in the system could easily do to her what she'd just done to the 5 Cookie Cruisers - they all mounted plenty of heavy anti-ship weapons. The real trick, and the mark of a true master of battle, was to get in shots while denying the enemy ships a chance to do the same back to you.

No commander lived long who simply charged enemy ships and traded volleys with them. The military academy of the 12 Colonies had stressed that again and again, and Cain had been a good student.

But most rules can occasionally be broken, under the right circumstances.

For example, there was a cardinal rule to 'Never split your forces' - Cain was trampling all over that rule in this fight, though to good effect. By splitting his own forces, he encouraged the Cylons to split theirs. Then with superior bettlefield intelligence and mobility, he could arrange surprises and local superiority.

As soon as her missile tubes were reloaded, Pegasus attacked again.

This time, she charged right at Cylon ship group D2, which was flying through the star system from Bushwhack VI to Bushwhack V on the trail of a Destroyer Escort.

The only terrain in that area was asteroid belts 2 and 3, and group D2 was staying in-between them to keep the space around them clear, and so avoid any possibility of ambush.

Cain surprised them by charging right at them, in the open.

The 3 Cookie Cruisers and 2 Pucks of Group D2 turned to face the oncoming BattleStar, confident that each of them could take her out several times over.

Humans would have flinched at the losses they themselves would take in such an exchange, but Cylons didn't mind losses if it helped them attain their goals. And destroying Pegasus was one of their most important goals.

Pegasus sped straight at the Cylons, as if intent on going out in a blaze of glory. But, just before reaching maximum effective weapons range, Cain pulled one of his tricks.

Attached to the very front of Pegasus was a Dazzler mine.

Cain shut off his sensors, triggered the mine, and swerved hard to port and upwards.

Some Cylon missiles and anti-ship lasers passed through the space where Pegasus would have been had she continued straight. But the Cylons' sensors had been completely blinded, so they were just guessing at where to shoot.

Pegasus' sensors were off while the mine was on, but worked fine when she turned them on again a moment later.

Her missiles and lasers worked fine too, and took out the entire group of Cylons with 3 missiles to spare.

Such a tactic was very risky, since it required you blind yourself for a moment right when you were almost in range of the enemy. But Cain was a master judge of risk and pulled it off without a problem.

Other groups of Cylon ships and Raiders headed for where Pegasus had been, but she fled again - as she had for most of the battle - zipping from place to place and avoiding encounters with Cylons while keeping them guessing about her location.

The other human ships and fighters kept up the same game - mostly running and hiding, but fighting when they could arrange an advantage.

About this time, the Firebases fired their pulsars again. They had arranged it so that the fire seemed to come from roughly the position of fake base 1, but in fact they were in the outer solar system, well past that planet. They fired at the Puck and Shell Game in group C1, then ran and hid again.

The Shell Game Frigate exploded, but the Puck Destroyer was only damaged.

True to Cylon standard procedures, it turned and headed for Gomoray to go get repaired.

As the damaged Puck passed asteroid belt 3, Pegasus caught up with it. The Puck had enough time to turn and bring its missiles to bear, but that didn't help it.

The launchers for anti-ship missiles, on most ships, gave the missiles a significant boost as they launch. The boost gave them enough initial speed to make it harder to shoot them down. It also increased their range a bit.

When the missiles did not have such a boost - like on the asteroids where they'd drilled simple tubes for them to launch from - the missiles used their own engines to get up to speed. Consequently those engines burned out more quickly and so their range was reduced.

Pucks could fit in anti-ship missile launchers, but just barely. They did not have room for the boosting mechanisms.

So the Puck readied its 6 anti-ship missiles to shoot Pegasus, but they didn't get to fire. Pegasus launched, from her maximum range, 2 of the 3 missiles she still had loaded, then swerved away.

The Puck had nothing to shoot them down with. It exploded, as Pegasus went back to leading the remaining Cylons on a merry chase through the system, sometimes zipping from one distant part of the system to another, sometimes flying complicated rings around and between the various moons of a gas giant, and always staying well away from any Cylons.

When she was ready, she set up another ambush.

Bushwhack IV had already seen the destruction of several Cylon ships - 4 Base Stars, a Puck, and a few groups of Raiders at one time or another.

Consequently it had various clouds of hot ionized metal gas around it.

So it was a good ambush site, and the Cylons were consequently very wary when near it.

Currently it was almost as close to Bushwhack V as their orbits ever carried them.

And Bushwhack V had had no Cylon ships destroyed there, and relatively few Raiders - no more than any other planet.

So it was not a likely place for an ambush, and, consequently, was where Cain set up his ambush, since the Cylons would not expect it there.

He flew Pegasus around Bushwhack IV quite a bit, as if working on setting up an ambush there. Then Pegasus disappeared.

He'd snuck to Bushwhack V as stealthily as he could.

Since Bushwhack IV was where he'd last been seen, the Cylons went and, very cautiously, searched the area.

And as with all searches, when they failed to find their target there, they expanded the search outwards.

As the search progressed, their wariness faded.

Nobody can maintain maximum caution indefinitely.

So when they got to Bushwhack V to search it, their 'edge was blunted' a bit, as the saying goes. They still searched, but not with the same hair-trigger readiness they'd had when they expected to be ambushed at any moment.

They didn't expect to find anything hiding, since to this point, Pegasus had been constantly in motion and at, or near, her top speed.

The atmosphere of the gas giant planet known as Bushwhack V was marvelously complex and a great place to hide.

It was electrically charged, though only to mild levels - enough to seriously mess up scans but not enough to damage ships.

It was also chemically complex & Cain had previously had it augmented with additional metals - seeding it with many tons of powdered metals - to make scanning difficult, especially while other jamming was occurring.

So Pegasus was effectively invisible while hiding there.

In such an atmosphere, her own scanners did not work well either - they barely worked at all.

But they worked enough to spot a large group of Cylon ships nearby, flying through clear uncomplicated vacuum - just as a nearly deaf man can still hear a herd of large livestock thunder by.

Again it was a risk for Pegasus to pop out of cover, with no speed built up and with an incomplete sensor picture of her opponents. A commander who was merely adequate could have lost everything in such a bid. But Cain was a master. He could possibly have done it with no sensor information at all, just by using his very expert estimation of the enemy's likely movements and responses.

He'd faced Cylons continuously for yahrens. They liked to be orderly, and that means predictable. Cain, an excellent commander to start with, could now predict Cylons very very well.

So Pegasus emerged from the atmosphere of Bushwhack V just as the Cylons passed, and shot them in the rear, where they had very few weapons that could bear in any case, and no time now to get them pointed them that way, much less aim or fire.

Cylon group B1, currently composed of 2 Cookie Cruisers and 2 Pucks, received 6 missiles from Pegasus and all died.

Pegasus then immediately charged group C1 with her 6 remaining missiles.

Cain liked to change tactics to keep the enemy guessing, but there was another reason for the charge.

His calculated timing said that the Raiders in the system would need refueling now, or very very soon.

Pegasus started on the basis of that calculation alone, but before he left Bushwhack V his estimate was confirmed - during a jamming window - by transmission from the sensor buoys: the Cylon Raiders throughout the Bushwhack system had returned to their ships.

The 1691 surviving Raiders in the Bushwhack system distributed themselves more or less evenly among the 2 Base Stars, 3 Cookie Cruisers, 2 Pancake Stacks and 1 Short Stack which remained.

As they were landing, the 900 other Raiders returned.

These 900 were the ones which had been sent to chase the ragtag ships. The racing yachts Grasschopper and Frog of the North, piloted by the sort of 'adrenaline junkies' you'd expect to pilot racing craft, were exuberant about the chase and had enjoyed it immensely. They had baited the Cylons along as long as they could.

The priority package delivery ship Rhideras had responded to the challenge and did almost as well.

All 3 had kept their Raider groups chasing them until the Raiders were on the very red-line, as far as fuel went.

But Cylons had no trouble reading fuel gauges, and without special tricks being played on them, they did not stay out so long as to run out of fuel.

However, some of them barely completed landing before their fuel tanks ran dry.

The yachts had managed to be very tempting indeed.

So all the surviving Raiders had landed on their carriers just before Pegasus charged group C1.

The carriers of group C1 were near the center of the system, to the 'north', in the orbit of planet II, though planet II was currently about 1/3 of it's orbit away from that point, clockwise.

Pegasus had an almost-clear run straight for that group: only having to cross asteroid belt 2, then belt 1. These belts kept it hidden from group C1 until Pegasus crossed asteroid belt 1.

The Cylon ships began turning as soon as they saw Pegasus approaching.

But by that point, Pegasus was at top speed, and they had been at a dead stop, so starting to move took them a while.

Still, given their goal of not being ambush-able, they had chosen their position well, and would have had enough time to turn and face Pegasus, if Cain hadn't been so sneaky.

He positioned Pegasus so that the unarmed Short Stack was between the BattleStar and the comparatively poorly armed, but still very deadly, Pancake Stacks.

The Cylons began movements so they could fire past the Short Stack, but Pegasus was far more maneuverable than they were in any case, and especially now when they had to start moving after having been motionless. They had poor acceleration and just couldn't move fast enough.

So Pegasus arrived in range of the Short Stack before the Pancake Stacks could shoot at the BattleStar, since the unfortunate Short Stack was in their way.

Pegasus didn't even slow down as she blasted the Short Stack with all her lasers, turreted and anti-ship alike, concentrating on her landing bays.

Then, to be sure, Pegasus shut off her sensors briefly and set off another Dazzler mine.

This blinded only the Short Stack, as the Pancake Stacks were behind it, though they could tell a Dazzler had been set off and would likely be ready if Cain were to try a second one.

But with the Short Stack blind, she could not report situational changes to the Pancake Stacks behind her.

Pegasus had been aimed to pass the Short Stack to the right, but the moment she blinded the carrier, she swerved hard left and down.

So she passed the Short Stack in a place where the Pancake Stacks were not aiming.

They'd been anticipating where Pegasus would emerge, and had been turning hard to aim at that point.

When Pegasus emerged on the opposite side, the Pancake Stacks were not able to fire at her. Their anti-ship missiles only pointed forwards.

Since they'd been turning hard to one side, the unwieldy ships would have to arrest that movement and turn hard to the other side before they could fire.

They didn't have the time.

Each got hit by about half of Cain's available armament - 3 missiles, a heavy anti-ship laser, and 200 laser turrets.

The poorly armored ships could take a lot of damage due to their sheer size, but they could not take that kind of punishment.

The 2 Pancake Stacks exploded.

Cain would have liked to stay and finish off the Short Stack, but the remaining Cylon groups, B2 and D1, were both headed this way and the efficient Base Stars had finished refueling their Raiders and re-launched them even before he'd charged.

So there were plenty of Cylons around - enough to kill Pegasus, and to spare, if she paused and let them catch her.

As Pegasus sped off to continue letting the Cylons chase her around the system, and to reload her missile tubes one last time - her cargo space was almost empty - the damaged Short Stack, unable to launch fighters, left for Gomoray and the repair base there.

Pegasus fled to the 'east' of the system, and hadn't gone very far when a 'jamming window' opened, allowing the Cylons to catch a glimpse of two Destroyer Escorts landing Vipers by Bushwhack III. It was not accidental that they glimpsed this, though it appeared so.

The site was far enough from the ship groups that they'd take a while to arrive.

So they sent their Raiders to go stomp the Destroyer Escorts, quick while they still had a good idea of their location.

They had few enough Raiders now that they did not feel they could afford splitting into smaller groups to hunt things down. So the 672 remaining Raiders - 300 each from the 2 Base Stars and 24 each from the 3 remaining Cookie Cruisers all stayed together as they charged the 2 Destroyer Escorts.

As had happened so many times that day, when they got there, there were far stronger human forces waiting than they had been expecting, plus another surprise.

By this time, the system was littered with the wrecks of Cylon Raiders.

One more didn't attract any attention at all.

But the one drifting near the 2 Destroyer Escorts had not actually been destroyed in this battle. It had been built in Alfred's machine shops, along with several others. This one, and a few more, had been built to look as if it had been disabled, yet left largely intact, by a hit from a laser rifle such as those mounted on so many of the Vipers in this battle.

Being largely intact, it was better at its real job - concealing a mine.

The 'destroyed Raider' had recently been planted in its current position by one of the Destroyer Escorts.

When the observing humans judged the moment to be as good as it was going to get, the mine in the 'destroyed Raider' was detonated, taking out 208 of the 672 Raiders.

Almost 300 Vipers, plus all 3 Destroyer Escorts, jumped the remaining 464 Raiders, who didn't last long enough for their ships to come rescue them.

The Cylon ships didn't even try.

It was very clear that they could not get there in time, and they were tired of getting ambushed.

Fighting the humans in the Bushwhack system had been like a diver fighting a shark in its home kelp forest at night - the shark attacked at will, disappeared into the kelp, and kept it up as long as it liked, with no real hope of their being an effective response.

So while the Vipers and Destroyer Escorts scattered and fled as usual, the remaining Cylons gathered together in a clear spot, well away from ambush sites, while planning what to do.

They still had overwhelming force, if they could somehow bring it to bear, so they didn't want to leave while they had a chance to strike at Pegasus.

They would have sat still while doing their planning, but they'd seen what happened to group C1 as a result. So instead they cruised at a steady speed in between asteroid belts 2 and 3.

They didn't cruise there for long before a Cylon relief force arrived...or so it appeared.

The force arriving included 600 Raiders accompanied by a fuel tanker, plus an F series freighter, a G series freighter, and 4 Pucks.

Due to the continued communication jamming, neither group could contact the other.

But both began scrupulously following standard Cylon procedures, taking up the right formations as the Raiders started landing on the Base Stars, apparently to refuel since the accompanying tanker was already empty.

As those Raiders landed, the freighters F105 and G12 started unloading additional Raiders, unpacking them from their crates to fly over to the Cookie Cruisers as their reinforcements, since that would be expected by standard Cylon procedures.

But they had not unloaded many before the other 600 Raiders had all landed on the 2 Base Stars.

And at that point there was no more point in pretending.

As soon as all 600 Raiders had landed, four human soldiers or armed volunteers rushed out of each one and took over the Base Stars, starting with lightning-quick attacks on the command cores to disable the ships so they could neither move nor fire.

The rest of the apparently Cylon force - which the humans were calling Force Z, and which consisted of all the ships the humans had captured from the Cylons - waited just enough time, and no longer, to allow that assault to get going, then they too attacked.

The 4 'new Raiders' un-crated by the 2 freighters so far, had flown over to 2 Cookie Cruisers and landed. They proved to be pilotless Raiders loaded with explosives, which now detonated and destroyed those ships from within.

And the 4 human-controlled Pucks, mounting between them twice as many missiles alone as it would take - and almost enough anti-ship lasers to do the job by themselves - blasted the remaining Cookie Cruiser and 4 Cylon Pucks to smithereens.

It was amazing what you could do when you 'got the drop' on the enemy.

And with that, all ship combat in the Bushwhack system was over, though combat on board the Base Stars continued a while longer.

The plan for capturing the Base Stars was remarkably simple - If you capture and hold something the Cylons really want, they will predictably attack it, and do so repeatedly until they win or lose. And for most groups of Cylons, their attacks don't get more complicated than frontal assaults. With numbers and resources like theirs, that had frequently been enough.

But their numbers advantage on the Base Stars was not overwhelming.

Each Base Star had about 2000 Cylons aboard.

And on each Base Star, almost 1200 humans had landed, crammed 4 each into the 300 Raiders that had brought them.

A little over half that number were soldiers.

Most of the rest were armed volunteers.

And a very few were apparently Cylons. These had been built in Alfred's workshops as simple labor robots, using none of the original software or programming the Cylons used for those.

Their new programming did not extend much farther than walking, lifting, carrying, and digging, as voice commanded by a human.

But they were very useful for confusing Cylons, since they appeared to be Cylons themselves.

So, for example, if one of Alfred's Cylon-appearing robots walked down a hall, carrying a laser rifle, and had a bunch of humans following him, Cylons observing it tended to leap to the assumption that the humans were prisoners of a Cylon and being taken somewhere by that Cylon.

Or if Cylons were defending a room in case of attack, and expected to see humans come around the corner any instant, but instead saw what appeared to be another Cylon come around that corner, they'd relax a bit, leaving them open for sudden attack.

And, of course, simply carrying a bomb into the right place was often a good use for a robot which appeared to be a Cylon - you'd lose that robot when the bomb went off, but the Cylons would lose an important defense position and all the Cylons in it.

So, assisted in certain ways by Alfred's Cylon-appearing robots, and armed with all the usual weapons and defenses, augmented by a plasma pistol each, plus smoke generators and thermal-vision visors, the human forces took over, very rapidly, the control areas of the Base Stars.

Then they defended those, assisted by cross-fire from humans holding nearby areas, against a series of Cylon assaults. They did that until there were no more Cylons.

After that the soldiers checked out the entire ships, just to be sure there were no more Cylons.

Then they got replaced by crew technicians who began work on mastering how to fly this particular kind of Cylon ship, and a few repair workers to fix up damage from the combat.

The soldiers went back to their captured Raiders, and prepared for the next stage in Cain's plan.


	24. Chapter 24

Chapter 24

Cain stepped into the briefing room on Galactica and Adama cheerfully shook his hand, saying "The 2 fuel tankers you sent have arrived. I'm glad you were able to get fuel without making any reckless attacks."

"So am I." Cain smiled.

"So," Adama continued, "What is the status of the Cylon fleets near here?"

"We have nothing to worry about for the moment."

"That's wonderful." Adama smiled.

"Well, to clarify - we don't have to worry about those Cylon fleets because I destroyed them all. Well, except for the few that I captured."

"What?" Adama exploded. "You said you wouldn't, and didn't, make any reckless attacks!"

Cain shrugged. "In my professional estimation, it wasn't reckless. Besides, they say if it works, it wasn't reckless. Our losses were trivial - a few destroyed fighters and several minor hits on the Frigates, Destroyer Escorts and Pegasus - stuff that's easily repaired."

Adama shook his head and sighed "Tell me at least that you didn't engage in any reckless adventures on Gomoray - attacking it would have been much too risky."

Cain, deadpan, replied "Do you mean you want me to give it back?"

"What?"

Cain sat down and summarized "After taking out their fleets, I sent the captured Cylon freighters, tanker and Raiders, to Gomoray. The Raiders landed without incident just as Pegasus arrived. That got the Cylons all stirred up - a Base Star hidden on the far side of the planet launched all its fighters, but curiously landed them at the capitol city instead of attacking us. They then devoted themselves to protecting one of those fighters after it loaded something and took off again. That was a pretty good clue that whatever they loaded was very important, so I had half of our captured Raiders full of soldiers - 300 of them - take off again. While our Vipers were attacking their Raiders, our Raiders joined their group, safe because the Cylons couldn't tell they weren't theirs. Our Vipers could tell them apart because of the Identification Friend or Foe signals each of our Raiders transmitted. So we whittled them down as they went back to their Base Star and landed again, then the Base Star fled at top speed, leaving a few Raiders behind. But they didn't flee for long - the soldiers carried aboard by our Raiders took over the ship pretty quickly. We've already towed it back."

"So you took over a Base Star - nice work, but what about Gomoray."

"That was easy." Cain responded "Our soldiers took over the one place the Cylons couldn't do without - their power station. They only built one because that's more efficient. But it's also more vulnerable. So we took that and shut off power to their facilities. With no energy, their technology doesn't work - except a few things with self-contained power like robots, handheld stuff, and a few vehicles - and without technology, Cylons are mostly just big bugs. They predictably all swarmed to attack the power station. Mostly they got taken out by strafing Vipers, but our soldiers did good work too. Want a planet? It's empty but for our own troops."

Adama was silent a moment as he took it all in, so Cain added "It's a nice, highly industrialized planet that can be farmed too. Come on, who could say no to that? Oh yah, it's a major exporter of tylium too - has huge reserves. The tankers I sent you - I'd emptied them into our own tanks after I took them, so I filled them up again at Gomoray before sending them to you. At least stop by long enough to fill up."

"No Cain - I'm not silent because I object, but because I'm taking it all in. By the way, what was so important to the Cylons that they went to such lengths to retrieve it from the surface of Gomoray?"

"Remarkable stuff that - their records indicate the local governor, probably to save face, had not been reporting Pegasus' raids. Consequently an important visit got scheduled, and we happened by as it was taking place. Do you want to see the Cylons' Imperious Leader?"

"What?" Adama had thought he couldn't be more surprised than he already had been. He was wrong.

"Well," Cain explained "I don't mean you can have a chat with him - he died during the fighting. His body is in the morgue for study. They really do have 3 brains, it turns out."

"Maybe later." Adama said. "Tell me, how did you defeat the Cylon fleets? Our analysts believe they have, uh, had I guess, quite a few ships."

"Yup, they sure did!" Cain enthused. "But it was like one of those old sporting events they had on Taura long ago - the ones called bullfights where one man takes on a large angry bull using only a thin sword and a cape to distract it: if you're quick enough and keep the other side confused, the relative strengths don't matter.

I sent you a report of the battle. It was titled 'Send more Cylons'. Did you not get it?"

"No." Adama shook his head.

"Well, there had been a lot of jamming and we hadn't cleaned up everything yet. I'll send it again."

"Please do," Adama said. "But for now, just the highlights - so you captured a Base Star, and something else? What else?"

Just then they were interrupted by a frantic tech bursting in and saying "Commander! There are 2 Base Stars headed straight for us!"

Cain interrupted "Have they got alternating red and green running lights on?"

The confused tech consulted his handheld computer and replied "Yes."

"Nevermind those," Cain smiled "They're ours."

Adama instructed the tech to make contact with the approaching Base Stars, then contact the fleet to reassure them.

Then he turned to Cain and said "You were saying?"

"Well, we captured those two Base Stars in the battle, then the one Imperious Leader was on. Then when we took the repair base on Gomoray, we got the ships that had been repairing there - a Zorkaelian Battlecruiser and 2 Short Stack carriers. They'd probably have fought back or run, but they were partially disassembled for repair and couldn't take off. And about this time tomorrow, we'll capture 6300 Raiders - they're coasting thru space completely out of fuel, and by this time tomorrow all their remaining power will certainly have drained away, though we'll be careful just in case."

"What do we want with 6300 Raiders?" Adama asked

"We did pretty well with 600." Cain asserted "And if nothing else, they make good scrap, though Alfred's folks are already overwhelmed with collecting scrap from the Bushwhack system - there's a lot there."

They both paused a moment and Cain added "Oh yeah, there's also 23 assorted freighters and 4 more tankers that the Frigates captured while raiding Cylon shipping. We haven't collected them all yet - the Frigates had to leave a bunch in place after capturing them so they could go on wreaking havoc. So they simply put mines in each captured freighter to deny it to the Cylons if they should happen by before we did, then marked the location and sped off to attack more Cylon shipping. We have the codes for the mines, so there's no danger, but it takes a while to get around to them all and collect them. And the Frigates are still at it, so there should be more to collect before we've collected all of these. There was a lot of shipping between Gomoray's industry and other Cylon planets. Not anymore. The Frigates went through it like a tornado through a tent city, and also took out Cylon patrols, outposts and satellites too. We plan to keep up their raids - I figure it's better to take their ships full of stuff before they assemble that stuff into warships."

Adama let out a deep breath, saying "Ok, I'm finding that summaries aren't enough. Tell me everything. In detail."

Cain did.

It took all day.

During that time, all their ships, and the ragtag fleet, headed for Gomoray.

When they got there, they found most of Alfred's ships already there.

The ones that weren't there were collecting salvage in the Bushwhack system or shuttling it to Gomoray.

Pod 45 was hauling the biggest chunks of salvage. Until this, it had still been mostly full of livestock from the planet Serenity. But Alfred needed the space, so he'd offloaded the animals onto Gomoray, figuring that some people, at least, would certainly want to stay there, and that those people would want animals - everybody needed to eat.

Most of Alfred's people were busy too.

Some were building Planetary Pulsars on Gomoray, so it could defend itself. Cain had said it would need 8.

Many more were inspecting the former-Cylon ship repair base on the planet. In it they'd found plans for all the ship types operated by the Cylons. So they were also getting started repairing the Short Stack carriers and Zorkaelian Battlecruiser there.

From that Zorkaelian Battlecruiser, and the plans for it, they'd gotten ideas about how they might use rail-guns to fire large numbers of mini-mines at high speeds. Experiments on that were beginning.

And they were looking at ways to upgrade the repair base to be a full shipyard, able to construct ships of any size, including BattleStars.

Cain had a lot of ships, between the ships already in Fleet 2, the ships newly captured in battle and at the repair base, and the new ships the FRD was building, which were almost done.

But he would need more.

One of the additional ships Cain wanted could be done right away.

He'd been looking over reports of former battles, had been impressed by the performance of the BattleSphere - which he called the BattleFarm - and asked for one to be built for him, with some alterations.

He wanted his version to be called the SiegeSphere, and to be armed with anti-ship weapons.

To build it, they would use a process almost the same as the one they'd used for the first BattleSphere.

There was plenty of metal available from salvage.

They didn't have one big Kobold reactionless drive to put into it - rather they had 4, which they'd been building to power the 4 Pucks.

Originally they had not had the machines, or the space, to make the big Kobold drives, but the pucks needed that size drive, and the FRD had the capacity. So they'd built the machines and started building the drives.

But now, with an excellent source of tylium, the plan to change the engines in the pucks was being shelved. So the engines were available.

Cain wanted the SiegeSphere overpowered, so they put two of the big Kobold drives in the design, as well as plenty of fusion energizers.

When asked what to do with the other 2 drives, Alfred thought about it, shrugged, and ordered a second SiegeSphere - they had enough metal from salvage to build both.

The outermost spheres they built in a single afternoon.

The inner nested spheres would be just as fast, except they either need time to cool or need to be cooled artificially, such as by carefully applying frozen masses from comets.

On top of the outermost sphere, they put a 10 metron thick layer of superconductor - four times as thick as they had put on the BattleSphere. That was a lot of what they'd need the second engine for - hauling around all that mass.

Inside, there would be no aquarium or trees. Instead there was a vast amount of power generation and storage. It would need all that to run the 7 anti-ship lasers filling airlock 1, and the 12 pulsars filling airlock 2.

Those spots would no longer be airlocks - but dedicated weapon-firing ports.

Airlock 3 would remain an airlock, to allow use of the vast number of Vipers and shuttles the ship could carry.

It's horde of artillery crawlers would also use the third airlock when they needed to move between the ships hull and storage within the ship.

Those would be Artillery Crawler Mark 2, with one less 1 laser turret to make room for a dozen small rail-guns such as the Zorkaelian Battlecruiser used for anti-missile and anti-fighter work. They would also look a little like snails, since each would carry with it a thin dome of superconductor, which it would lower into contact with the SiegeSphere when the crawler didn't need to move. They also had complicated arrangements of sliding superconductor plates at the firing ports to allow the guns to traverse while maintaining as much superconductor coverage as possible. They even ran superconductor around the weapon barrels and connected that to the sliding plates. So the whole crawler was covered by superconductor, except for the very tips of the weapon barrels, or when it opened a big sliding plate so it could throw mines.

So all the energy delivered by laser hits would, even if it hit a crawler, be evenly distributed among all the superconductor on the whole ship, which would protect the crawlers except in cases where the tip of a weapon barrel was hit.

The ships would be a 'first', in that pulsars had never had so much internal ship space dedicated to them before. The Firebases, though they had most of their internal space dedicated to the storage and generation of energy in order to support their pulsars, were much smaller ships.

The SiegeSpheres would be dedicating to each pulsar 200 times as much space for energy storage as the Firebases did, and 240 times as much space to energy generation.

So it was anticipated it could fire quite a few pulsar shots, much faster, than existing ships could.

You can get extreme results from extreme efforts.

And with all that, the SiegeSphere would still have room for a specialized manufactury for anti-ship missiles, so it could resupply friendly ships. That meant that it's bay for shuttles, Vipers, and Artillery Crawlers would only be 6.5 times as voluminous as an entire Liberty Ship. But that should still be plenty.

Cain loved winning by maneuver and mobility, but he pointed out that in some cases, like with fortified planets, there weren't many options for sneaking up on them - sometimes you had to have the ability to approach openly, soaking up damage as you came, and then deliver a heavy blow - 'to bash your way in the front door', as he put it.

The SiegeSpheres could do that.

Its 2,576,629 cubic metrons of superconductor would only increase temperature by 1.7 degrees each time it got hit by a heavy anti-ship laser. So it was effectively safe from those, since the SiegeSpheres would be able to fire back and knock out any enemy guns well before they could get enough hits on the SiegeSphere to matter.

And the plan was to include enough Artillery Crawler Mark 2, so their rail-guns could make it safe from missiles and fighters.

Cain intended to start raiding some Cylon planets in the very near future. And even hit-and-run raids like he planned could use ships like these.

They'd be slow compared to most of his ships.

And their sensor suites were very poor indeed compared to most ships, and positively primitive compared to military ships - there was a cost to making such a thick skin unpierced by things like sensor pods.

But the plan was to accommodate its weaknesses by giving it plenty of Recon Vipers, and to make sure it always worked with other military ships of more usual types.

Cain said it had all the subtlety of a brick, all the finesse of an enormous mallet, and all the elegance and refinement of a big cannon on a simple barge, but that those weapons, while crude, could also be effective - some riots in their history had been dominated by bricks used as weapons.

And if your brick weighed 2 tons and you could manage to drop it on your enemy, that was very effective indeed.

He said the SiegeSpheres were like war stripped of all pretension - sheer raw brute force.

Alfred was thinking that over as he walked into his office one morning and got quite a shock.

Sally was being attacked by some kind of alien.

He drew his pistol as fast as he could, but while he did so, the big furry thing smothering Sally quickly squirmed around behind her.

He switched his pistol to stun but before he could fire, he was almost deafened by the exclamation:

"Don't you dare shoot Mister Fluffy-Cuddles!" coming from a very irate Sally.

He was trying to process that when, with a sound like a tremendous fart, the furry thing launched itself through the air at him, wielding a knife in each of it's 8 tentacles.

He wasn't sure if Sally was being brave or stupid as she grabbed it by a trailing tentacle and yelled "No!"

The alien neither struggled nor attacked her, but protested "Bad monster shoot!".

"He's not a bad monster," Sally explained patiently to the furry octopoid. "He's good, but confused - he doesn't understand."

"Good monster?" queried Mister Fluffy-Cuddles, calming noticeably and putting its knives back into pouches.

"Yes, he's a good monster." Sally explained to the alien, while stroking its fur.

Then she turned to Alfred and said "Don't read anything into the 'monster' thing: the Ootuul - that's the race that Mister Fluffy-Cuddles belongs to - are only semi-sentient and max out at about a 200 word vocabulary. 'Monster' is the word they use for all aliens. To him, humans are just as alien as Cylons, though they have plenty of reason to hate Cylons and no reason to hate humans."

It was apparent that the Ootuul understood at least a few more words than they spoke, since at the mention of Cylons it insisted "Smash bad monster!" then, "Smash smash smash!"

Sally pulled out some kind of treat and fed it to the alien while explaining. "Their whole race is enslaved by the Cylons and made to work in mines, on farms and such. They're often worked to death, according to the records we recovered. We found a bunch of Ootuul on Gomoray still stabbing already-dead Cylons or bashing them with rocks. They don't like them a bit."

"More cookie?" queried Mister Fluffy-Cuddles.

Sally gave him another treat.

"He looked pretty serious with those knives a centon ago." Alfred said "How far can he be trusted?"

"Here," said Sally, tossing Alfred a data crystal "Watch this. Their actions speak louder than any words I could say."

Keeping one eye on the potentially dangerous alien, Alfred put the crystal in a reader and watched.

It was a short recording of several Ootuul in the psychiatric wards of the hospital. There were scenes of them hugging human patients, singing to them in strange but appealing ways, and of several Ootuul floating in midair while doing group dances.

The narrator explained that their music, dancing, and especially their hugs, given their soft luxuriant fur and warm soft bodies, had been having a profoundly therapeutic effect on the patients.

They seemed to respond to emotional needs.

This had first been discovered when a soldier suffering from an emotional loss had happened upon an Ootuul on Gomoray. They'd become instant friends and the soldier brought his new friend to the Psychiatric ward with him.

The Ootuul were surprisingly light and were completely without bones. They had inflatable gasbags which they could fill with hydrogen, which was excreted by their bodies and normally stored compressed. This allowed them to float in midair or fly. While floating or flying, they moved by breathing in on one side and breathing out on the other side - a form of natural jet propulsion, though slow. When they wanted to go faster, they could ignite hydrogen while expelling it - a form of natural rocket propulsion, which they referred to as "burn farts".

Neither form of propulsion was very fast, even compared to the speeds of other biological life.

When carrying much of anything, they were too heavy to fly and had to walk along on their 8 powerfully-muscled tentacles.

They were simple souls, with small vocabularies and simplistic outlooks on life. What they liked, they liked unreservedly, and what they hated, they hated with a passion. When not motivated otherwise, they tended to be very friendly and fun loving.

They had never developed tool use, much less any kind of technology, though they could use simple tools they had been given and instructed in the use of.

Speculation among the scientific humans was that if the Ootuul ever developed to full sentience, or any real understanding of technology, it would not be for another couple of millennia.

Ootuul fur could change color like chameleons, making them pretty effective at hiding. And when not hiding, they seemed to prefer multi-colored grid patterns.

The Cylons liked to use them as slaves because they matured fast, could be made to breed fast, and came in a very wide variety of sizes, so whatever nasty dangerous manual labor job the Cylons had in mind, there were Ootuul sized right to do it.

And now Sally had one as a pet. Or maybe 'friend' was a better word - they were smarter than pets.

While Alfred had been watching the video, Sally's Ootuul friend Mister Fluffy-Cuddles had taken to idly spinning in the air, doing a set of interesting gyrations that the video had referred to as a dance.

It was actually entertaining to watch.

Alfred asked "Is it going to interrupt our work to have him around? I mean, do they mostly take care of and amuse themselves or will he be making constant demands on us?"

"Oh no Unc, Mister Fluffy-Cuddles will be no trouble at all!" Sally insisted. "That's part of why the hospital keeps them around - they're good for the patients and cause almost no interruptions."

"Speaking of hospitals, " she added "Have you seen the latest about the Cylon Hospitals on Gomoray?"

"Yes," Alfred said "We found their creepy apparatus - very specialized, high tech and precise, but still very creepy - where they start with two Cylons who have 1 brain each and end up with a 2-brained Cylon and a corpse. Disgusting!"

"I meant the new mystery - that their manuals describe maternity equipment and procedures, but no such equipment is in their hospitals." Sally said.

"Yah, that is weird. We don't really know why that would be - it's the first planet we've ever captured from the Cylons. Maybe it's because the planet was not originally theirs? They took it from the Delphian Empire - a one-planet empire of 50 million inhabitants - before they wiped out all the Delphians."

"That's sad," Sally frowned, then brightened "But at least the Delphians left really pretty crystalline buildings."

"Yup. And many of our people will be living in them soon. Possibly all of us. That's something the Council wants to discuss - whether to continue on to Earth, or just have everybody stay here. Some folks want to stay, and will. But everybody else could stay too. I'll be giving them my 'why Earth' speech again at the next meeting, since Gomoray fits all our needs for a safe place to start over. At least with the Planetary Pulsars, it does."

"I thought those couldn't shoot thru the nebula?" Sally asked

"True." Alfred replied "But the solar system sort of clears out the nebula within the system, so they can shoot that far at least, which will be far enough for the 8 Planetary Pulsars to neutralize any threat before it can be a problem."

They got down to discussing particulars of what was being built on the planet - 8 Planetary Pulsars, extensive anti-fighter batteries, some production facilities to round out what they Cylons and Delphians had already had, and the expansion of their repair base to function as a full shipyard.

The system would also be surrounded with several layers of sensor buoys so nothing could sneak up on it.

Things were looking bright for humanity at the moment, so it was with high spirits that Alfred went to the next Council meeting.

He came back in a different mood altogether.

The Council had voted in favor of continuing on to Earth. They had 'caught the vision' as they put it, and nothing less than Earth would do for them, despite Alfred's speeches.

They'd also continued to spend resources they didn't have, by passing new entitlements for furniture and ambrosia for everyone.

At least the furniture could be built - if the Council-controlled production facilities hadn't already been over-committed by 15%. But if they could find more hours in the day, or expand production, at least they could do it.

The Council had not voted to expand production - they didn't seem to care how stuff got done.

But the Ambrosia was another matter entirely. The only distillery equipment they'd had, had been picked up as salvage on Proteus. And when the Proteans had been landed on Antila, their distillery had been landed there with them. So there was neither anything to ferment, nor any apparatus to ferment it, nor anyplace to set up that apparatus.

That, at least, got the Council's attention. They'd voted for Hephaestus to produce a distillery ship. They hadn't come up with a way for it to do so, as over-committed as they were. They seemed to think that was beneath their notice. They simply commanded and expected folks to figure out a way.

That was frustrating to Alfred - he really cared about producing things.

But it was also frustrating to Cain, who was new to the Council's complete impracticality and pie-in-the-sky ideas.

It bothered him, but he didn't boil over until they voted to require his warriors to go through training for manners and etiquette, for use in situations where they do first contact and therefore serve as ambassadors.

Cain could not take that. He insisted that his Warriors had one job - 'to kill people and break things' and that spending training time on anything else 'detracted from their core mission'.

He stressed at length that combat is competitive - that your skills and abilities only matter in comparison to the enemy's, and that since the enemy is constantly working to get an edge, so must you.

He said his warriors would lose their edge - their advantage - in direct proportion to how much time they 'wasted' on any training other than combat training.

When the 9 career politicians on the Council pressed the issue, Cain resigned in disgust from the Council.

That shut the politicians up. They couldn't imagine valuing anything more than being in power.

But Cain didn't leave it there.

He made a speech, broadcast to all the humans in fleet and on the planet, describing, at length and in great detail, how he could not and would not work with 'such a bunch of idiots', and he named the 9 Councilors in question.

He used 'colorful language' and said they had 'less common sense than an infant', and 'less practicality than a battery-operated sponge sharpener'.

After that, he got downright rude.

It was a very widely watched speech, and people in every ship chuckled about it in the halls.

The Council, unable to counterattack against such a popular, successful, and widely-loved commander, instead insisted that the fleet leave Gomoray as soon as possible, since Cain would be staying behind.

Cain wanted to stay behind.

He planned to 'beat up the Cylons' as much as possible.

He pointed out that, though they had a military advantage right now in the form of the Planetary Pulsars, military technology advantages never last long - the Cylons would do all they could to find a way to nullify that advantage, and when, sooner or later, they found one, the humans would suddenly be back to the status of being refugees, fleeing and barely clinging to existence.

Cain vowed not to let that happen. He had raids in mind to take the war to the Cylons and beat them down - hopefully enough that they would lose the ability to threaten the humans.

He thought big.

And Alfred did all he could to help him, since it sounded like a good goal to him.

Alfred couldn't stay at Gomoray - the Council had decreed that the whole Council must stay together. So since they were leaving, he had to leave as well, if he wanted to retain any say in how things were run. And though he didn't have much say, he still hoped he could be a good influence.

But though he had to stay, his things didn't.

So he produced stuff for Cain as fast as he could, in the time they had left.

They had a little time, since Galactica had taken the opportunity to get an engine overhaul, while at a base that could easily do it.

They may have needed the overhaul, or it may have just been Adama arranging to stay a bit longer.

Alfred wasn't sure.

But he and his folks used the time to the best advantage they could.

More than two-thirds of the people of the fleet wished to stay on Gomoray - it was beautiful and had several modern cities, empty and available for them to move in to. And it was perceived to be safe, since Cain was also staying behind.

Many ships of the fleet - 135 ships including all the oldest and slowest, would be staying on Gomoray as well. They were not needed in the reduced ragtag fleet and would help greatly in jump-starting the development of the Gomoray star system.

Consequently there would be no ships in the fleet needing the kinds of upgrades Alfred had been doing - all 68 of the ragtag ships which were continuing on with Galactica had already been upgraded.

So Alfred shifted around what his ships were building.

Most of the ships building pre-Marron drives shifted over to building Vipers, so that Cain could have as much striking power as possible.

They also converted many of the captured Cylon Raiders over to remote-control - Cain said he had ideas how to use them.

Further they built as many sets of soldier gear as possible, both to equip Cain's warriors and so that any future volunteers would be as well-equipped as possible.

The Borellian trainers reporting to Alfred had very high standards to be met before they certified a new platoon of soldiers. Consequently the process was slow.

But twice now they'd used volunteers to fill out their numbers. And Alfred wanted any such volunteers to be well-equipped if that should happen again.

Since they were gearing up to make soldier equipment for Cain, they made a bunch for themselves too.

And lastly they hurried to finish the 2 new SiegeSpheres, and all the warships that Fred the FRD had been working on - 6 new Frigates, 5 new Firebases, and 3 new Destroyer Escorts.

So, they were leaving at Gomoray, with Cain and the Pegasus: all 12 Frigates, all 6 Destroyer Escorts, and the 2 SiegeSpheres, which were completed enough that they could be finished by Gomoray's facilities.

Also staying were all the captured Cylon ships including the 3 Base Stars, 2 Short Stack carriers, 4 Puck destroyers, and the Zorkaelian Battlecruiser. Some of them still needed repair, but the repair base at Gomoray could easily handle that, in addition to the new ship construction that Cain planned.

So Cain would have a potent military striking force, as well as the captured Cylon freighters and tankers to keep him, and the 135 ragtag ships, well supplied.

He'd been offered the 10 Firebase ships and declined, saying he didn't need them since he could count on support from the Planetary Pulsars on Tairac and Antila, and on ship-based pulsar support from the SiegeSpheres.

Gomoray's Planetary Pulsars, unfortunately, couldn't penetrate the surrounding nebula, so could only defend that planet.

So the 10 Firebase ships would be going with Galactica's group, along with 68 upgraded ragtag ships, Fred the FRD, the BattleSphere Mousetrap, 4 captured Cylon fuel tankers full of tylium, the agricultural ships, and all the Liberty Ships including the 2 Park ships and the 2 unnamed hulls they'd been towing along and using for materials storage.

They'd arrived at Gomoray with 23 Liberty Ships, and would be leaving with 27, having completed 4 more even though most of their efforts were going into building other things.

Four more pods were mostly done, though not commissioned as Liberty Ships yet. They had been offered to Cain, who'd declined the ships but accepted their production facilities, which had been moved to Gomoray's surface and would be replaced as they traveled.

Gomoray looked like it would be quite prosperous, and soon.

And then all too soon, it was time to leave Gomoray and continue the quest for Earth.


	25. Chapter 25

Chapter 25

Alfred was so busy that he didn't really pay attention to the election for Cain's replacement on the Council.

It was just as well - another career politician got elected.

Though it had come down to him or Marie - Sally's most popular Reality Star. Marie had gotten really close, and that was encouraging. More encouraging was that Yosh and Codan, 2 more Reality Stars, had come in third and 6th.

Interestingly, a couple out of work former politicians had approached Sally asking to be Reality Stars. Apparently they saw it as a chance to recover enough fame to get elected again.

Sally, though, was a good judge of character and had declined.

She could see that their friendly personas were just that - a persona or facade. They were not really nice people when it came down to it. That would be evident and contribute to poor show ratings.

Sally only made Reality TV shows for people who were legitimately fun or interesting or someone you could relate to. More importantly, she only made Stars of practical people with lots of common sense, in case their popularity should get them elected.

After being turned down, one of them tried to bribe Sally to change her mind, and the other tried veiled threats.

Neither realized that Sally had been recording the meetings.

So both got to be Reality Stars, in a way - Sally broadcast the recordings of the threats and bribery attempts, which made the 2 ex-politicians famous, in a negative way.

It also resulted in criminal trials and convictions.

Nobody else tried to bribe or threaten Sally.

Meanwhile Alfred had gotten Fred the FRD back to work. It had, only briefly, been mostly empty, after handing over the last batch of ships to Cain.

And it had used the time for some improvements to itself - various minor things like changing the position of some cranes to improve efficiency.

The delay had come from the question of what to build next.

Part of it was easy - Cain liked Frigates. They fit well with his preferred fighting style of using speed and maneuverability to hit the enemy where he wasn't ready.

And they fit well with Galactica's circumstances as well - if a patrol of Vipers ran into trouble, like taking damage or running out of fuel, and needed to land and be rescued, Frigates were perfect for that. They had no practical range limits, could defend themselves, get there and back quickly, and they even carried their own shuttles, which enabled all types of missions.

So construction of 12 more Frigates had been begun immediately.

The FRD had lots more capacity than that, but Cain wasn't terribly excited about Destroyer Escorts or Firebases, saying they had enough of those for now but what they really needed was scouts.

Cain's fighting style was at its best when he had lots of information on his enemy's positions, types, movements etc.

Viper patrols could provide that, and Recon Vipers even more so.

But there was a class of military ships, called Wanderers, which were designed for scouting. They were designed for independent operation by 3-man crews. They'd fallen out of favor because their crews hated them - being isolated on extremely long scouting missions really wore at them.

Other than that they were good ships - sleek, maneuverable and fast, with very long range compared to other ships, the best sensors and communications gear available, and the same guns as a Viper, plus a laser turret.

Each was only 40 metrons long and 10 metrons wide - just twice as long as a shuttle and two and a half times as wide. Much of their size was to accommodate a big fuel tank. Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, that fuel was tylium.

So Wanderers could go a certain distance & then had to return to base for more fuel, though its range was several times as far as most other ships, and orders of magnitude further than a fighter or shuttle.

But the humans no longer had a network of refueling bases. So operating Wanderers wasn't really an option...unless they modified them.

It had taken a surprisingly short time for Alfred's team to figure out how to make a Wanderer work with a pre-Marron drive, so that it could use Fusion power.

They replaced the enormous fuel tank with a much smaller one, allowing them to fit a much bigger engine, so they wouldn't lose too much performance.

And they added a scoop to the top of the ship, so it could refuel itself from planetary atmospheres or comets.

This, effectively, gave it infinite range.

But nobody wanted to fly it.

Being cramped in the small passenger accommodations for long periods was not appealing to anyone.

So they replaced the pilot controls and accommodations. The ship would, instead of having a human piloting team, be piloted by a modified version of CORA - the computer that flew Recon Vipers. It had communication gear sufficient to call in for instructions from just about anywhere, so it could operate for long periods at great distances.

The former pilot accommodations were mostly used for more engine, to regain as much of the original performance as possible. But some went into a small cargo area, with automatic doors and a robotic arm. This would hold 1 large mine, or 6 small mines, or a Sensor Buoy, which the wanderer could deploy wherever seemed best. Once the cargo space was emptied, the robotic arm could be used to fill it again with anything the Wanderer should encounter that was interesting enough to retrieve.

Having finalized the design, and hearing from Cain that it would fill his needs, they got busy building it.

Being only about twice the dimensions of a shuttle, they could fit a ton of them into Fred the FRD.

They worked it out and discovered that 518 Wanderers could be constructed at once, in addition to the 12 Frigates.

Production would move quickly, since the plan was to build the hulls and major systems in the FRD, then move them out and tow them while they got finished by the workshops on the Liberty Ships.

Wanderers would also be useful to Galactica's group, since each Wanderer could scout further out than even Recon Vipers, and knowing what was around you was always useful.

518 sounds like a lot of scouts, until you remember how big a galaxy is. Cain wanted as many Wanderers as he could get, since he intended to aggressively scout the Cylon Empire to aid in attacking it.

Meanwhile, the Council had ordered a change in what Hephaestus was building. The ships that had come along with the fleet - now not so ragtag as before - now generally had enough space for folks - as much, on average, as people enjoyed on a Liberty Ship.

So the previous program of expanding and improving passenger accommodations no longer made sense to anybody - not even the Council.

But that didn't mean they gave in to practicality and had the Hephaestus build something useful.

No, first it was to build a new distillery ship and a distillery to put in it.

Then it was to spend its time taking a ship at a time under tow, and completely refurbishing it from stem to stern, such that the ships would finish the process in like-new condition.

Admittedly many ships, even among the select few that were continuing, had old frayed wiring, corroded plates, leaks, or other problems that this process would fix.

But it still seemed to Alfred like they were choosing to work on something good and ignoring the fact that they could be working on something better.

Alfred's ships were working on things necessary for fighting - Vipers of all sorts, especially Recon Vipers, plenty of soldier gear and vehicles, Wanderer scouts, parts of bigger ships like Frigates in order to speed construction of those, and even more Liberty Ships.

The expanded production capacity they'd get with more Liberty Ships would let them build everything quicker and more abundantly. They could even expand into areas they'd only touched upon so far, such as simple labor robots, and remote control Raiders for use as guided missiles.

Anything that'd help them win the war was useful.

Extra Liberty Ships came with extra living space, since to change the design would be to slow the production significantly - they got Liberty Ships done fast largely because they were absolutely standardized.

And although, folks in the fleet now each had a personal space about as large as a bedroom had been back on the Colonies - now that they had the capacity, what was the harm in having a second such room? Rather, having better personal space tended to improve morale and raise productivity.

Not that they'd get a lot of extra personal space really quickly, but it was another thing to work up to. And it would sure help the new families deal with life better. Having plenty of food, since the completion of the BattleSphere, had sparked a population boom, and there were many families with noisy infants being born or due soon. Those families, at least, could certainly use a second room.

In fact, that would be a priority for whatever extra personal space they did get.

Alfred was working away as usual when Sally burst in exclaiming

"Unc, Starbuck is in jail and suspected of murder!"

"Did he do it?"

"Unc! Starbuck would never commit murder - that's totally unlike him."

"Ok ok, I'm just asking - how would I know what he's capable of?"

"I'd tell you!" Sally grumped.

"So tell me then, why do they think he did it?" Alfred asked.

"He and this other guy were quarreling and being extra harsh to each-other while playing Triad. Then right after one particularly rough game the other guy was found dead - shot by a laser pistol. Starbuck was the only one nearby and they tested his laser pistol and found out it was the murder weapon! But he was playing Triad and then changing, so he didn't always have his pistol with him."

Alfred thought a moment and asked "How do they know it's him and not one of his clones?"

"They were killed in the battles around Gomoray. Sorry I didn't tell you. They were flying Vipers from the Frigate flotilla and went up against a Cylon Patrol Boat and its Raiders. The Starbuck clones had good reflexes, and plenty of cocky self-assurance but no experience to give them judgment. They took risks they shouldn't have and got shot down. So it couldn't have been either of them. Oh Unc, what are we going to do?"

"Well I'm not going to interfere with the justice process, even assuming that I could somehow. But it seems to me like what they need to do is find out who fired the murder weapon."

"How Unc?"

"Just look at the fingerprints on the handle and especially the trigger. If there are more than one set, look very carefully and you can determine which set is superimposed on the other set or sets. That's the most recent set. Look for the person who matches those fingerprints."

"I'll tell them right now, thanks Unc." said Sally, as she sped off.

The tests came back within the hour, clearing Starbuck and matching someone in the database named Carybdis, who was a known criminal.

Soon afterwards he was tracked down and arrested.

Alfred wouldn't have even noticed, except that Sally made sure to update him at every stage. She also gave him a big hug - the hug was unusual because Mister Fluffy-Cuddles joined in with 3 of his 8 arms.

Alfred guessed that meant he was now an Ootuul friend too. That was kind of nice, actually.

Starbuck hadn't been freed for long before he went on a patrol and came back with a ship from Earth.

Or at least the rumors speculated that the ship was from Earth. It had humans inside. They were in hibernation sleep, which was used in the distant past for traveling long distances.

The Earth ship, which was only shuttle-sized, was escorted to Galactica, and studies were begun, to see how to interface safely with it and wake the passengers. Doctor Welker and Adama wanted to move slowly to be safe.

The Council wanted to move quickly, to satisfy their curiosity.

Tensions between Adama and the Council mounted over the issue.

And as always, Alfred sided with Adama.

Then, all of a sudden, the issue was solved...sort-of.

Starbuck and Apollo had snuck off with the Earth ship, insisting 'we have no right to risk the lives of these people by interfering with them or their ship'.

Apparently they planned to return it to the place where they'd found it, and let it fly itself to wherever it was going, escorted by the two in their Vipers.

All the people of the fleet eagerly awaited news - anything that might be related to Earth was a very big deal.

And news they got, but not of the sort they were expecting - It wasn't about Earth at all.

Commander Cain had raided some Cylon worlds, including Cylon IV - the 4th world circling the star named Cylon. It was the home-world of the Cylon race.

He'd approached Cylon IV as if he was a Cylon task force - 3 Base Stars and 4 Pucks, with a large group of Raiders preceding him and aiming to land on the planet, as if they needed to refuel or repair.

It was very difficult to determine the source of jamming, so he'd gone in while jamming communications so they couldn't contact him and discover his ruse.

As soon as his 7 ships had settled into orbit they'd all let loose with their heavy anti-ship weapons.

Each Base Star fired both their heavy anti-ship lasers - the one on top and the one on bottom, as well as the clusters of 3 anti-ship missiles mounted on each of the saucer's 5 sections.

So from the 3 Base Stars, 6 heavy anti-ship lasers and 45 heavy anti-ship missiles reached out for, and blasted, targets on the planet.

And from the 4 Pucks, another 8 heavy anti-ship lasers and 12 heavy anti-ship missiles did the same.

At the same time, the 900 remote-controlled Raiders that had been coming in for landings on the planet, changed course, scattered, and blew up targets of their own. Each carried an amount of explosives about equivalent to a standard mine, which, while a bit less powerful than an anti-ship missile, was a devastating explosion by any standard, but even more so when there was a planetary atmosphere to transmit blast waves.

They hit the key sites, as best as they'd been able to judge that in the short time they had to analyze their sensor data while approaching the planet.

No human had ever been to Cylon IV before, so nothing had been known about the planet.

So the strikes were not as devastating as they could have been by, for example, taking out every defense system on the planet - they simply didn't know where they all were.

But while they couldn't manage that, they did take out a valuable target with every hit.

They hit power and communications systems, manufacturing sites, shipyards, and all the defense sites they could identify.

They'd have fired their laser turrets too if those could have punched all the way through the atmosphere from orbit.

The raid didn't destroy the planet, any more than you could destroy an orchard using a hundred grenades. In that example, some trees would be destroyed, many more trees would be damaged to various levels, some would be completely untouched, and any orchard-wide system, such as automated picking systems or above-ground watering systems, would be heavily damaged and non-functional.

So, like an ant-farm repeatedly stabbed with an ice-pick, many of the Cylons' important structures were destroyed or damaged, and they were certainly stirred up. But they were not destroyed and, given time, they would be able to rebuild.

After firing one shot, Cain's forces fled as fast as they could, which was good because there were other defense sites - untouched because they had not been able to identify them before firing.

The planet launched thousands of Raiders to catch Cain's forces and destroy them.

They failed to do so.

Instead, the MUPPETs of Tairac fired at Cylon IV and disrupted the Cylons. Pulsars could not hit the surface of a planet through the atmosphere - the Hyperspace bubble popped too early and left the plasma charge to disperse in the atmosphere.

But the sudden dispersal of that much energy has another name - an explosion.

So several massive explosions from Planetary Pulsar shots rocked the upper atmosphere of Cylon IV, destroying a few Raiders and scattering most, flinging them around like leaves in a high wind.

The scattered Raiders took long enough to regain control of their craft that the human force was able to escape.

The Base Stars each got in a couple more hits from anti-ship lasers while they fled and before they got out of range.

Every bit of damage they could do to the Cylons helped.

The 2nd world that Cain's forces had raided was Zorkael II - the former home-world of the Zorkaelian empire and now a major slave world to the Cylons.

Here Cain's forces were the 2 Short Stacks and the Zorkaelian Battlecruiser.

These also approached under communications jamming while trying to appear to be a Cylon force.

This raid was launched simultaneously with the others, so the Cylons could not possibly have any warning.

They took a risk that they might look suspicious, and launched all 1600 Raiders as they approached the planet. Cain had estimated that they could get away with it, since no Cylon planet had ever been attacked before, and certainly not by what appeared to be Cylons.

And once again, Cain's estimate of risks proved to be accurate.

Just as they had at Cylon IV, the remote-controlled Raiders made as if to land, then changed course at the last centon to scatter to their targets, dive on them, and explode. Each explosion destroyed just about everything in a 1000 metron radius, with damage dropping off the further the blast wave traveled from the center.

The Zorkaelian Battlecruiser added to the destruction as best it could. It's small rail-guns could not bother the planet's surface - the pellets they fired would burn up on the way down. But it had 30 rail-guns firing man-sized shots, and 3 more firing shots the size of small vehicles, all spitting out several dozen shots per second just like the small ones.

All 33 of those could hit the surface of the planet, and did so just as fast as they could fire.

They were not able to fire for long, since this group too, needed to turn and flee immediately from clouds of Raiders rising from the planet's surface.

But while they were firing, they devastated the same kinds of targets as had been hit on Cylon IV.

The pursuing Raiders got the same treatment as on Cylon IV - the MUPPETS on Antila fired in support of Cain's ships, disrupting the Raiders enough that the ships could get away safely.

The MUPPETS also took out a Cylon Base Star which had been hidden behind the planet and which came out to pursue and attack the humans.

One shot from a Planetary Pulsar on Antila took it out.

The 3rd attack was far more straightforward. Cain himself in the BattleStar Pegasus made a strafing run, at top speed, at the planet Zonark III - a former member world of the Zorkaelian empire and now inhabited by the Cylons and a major world of theirs.

Pegasus swooped in so fast, and so unexpectedly, that she got off a full volley of anti-ship weapons and destroyed 14 targets, then swooped away before the Cylons could respond significantly.

Also swooping in at top speed were all 160 Vipers that Pegasus carried. They got one pass each at the planet before hurrying off to rejoin Pegasus.

Heedless of the extra fuel it would burn, they fired constantly while making their strafing run.

At her closest approach, Pegasus had also launched 6 modified shuttles. These were stripped of all non-essentials so that they could hold the largest possible explosive charges - roughly 9 times as much as a standard mine - giving them a blast radius of just over 2000 metrons. The shuttles were programmed to fly at maximum speed to certain targets and then detonate.

Two were shot down, but 4 hit, and obliterated entire Cylon cities.

Pegasus was going so fast the entire time that the Cylon forces had no hope of catching her.

But she didn't get away quite unscathed.

Someone on the planet, reacting fast, managed to get one hit on Pegasus using an anti-ship laser.

The hit tripped Pegasus' surge circuit, which threw so much energy, for one brief surge, into the ship's skintight forcefields, that it almost completely prevented the damage, though it burned out the forcefields to do so.

So, with minor damage and a burned-out forcefield generator, Pegasus flew to a point, midway between her former target and her next target, maintaining communication jamming all the way so her former target could not warn the next one.

Communications signals travel in a straight line, so, even though neither source nor destination was directly being jammed, a cloud of jamming directly in-between them still prevented them from talking.

At that midway point, Pegasus rendezvoused with a freighter and the Destroyer Escort accompanying and guarding it. There she picked up more missiles, shuttles, explosives, and sensor buoys.

Then she headed out to attack another Cylon planet, working on repairing herself as she went.

She could have returned to Gomoray for repairs, but Cain wanted to take advantage of surprise, and hit as many planets as he could before the Cylons figured it out and reacted. Given time, they'd figure out how to communicate what was happening, then they'd be far more careful about assuming ships that looked Cylon actually were Cylon, they'd and prepare better defenses.

Cain was intent on denying them that time.

Both of Cain's other attack groups had similar rendezvouses, where they reloaded, then headed for their own secondary targets.

They especially needed more pilotless Raider fighters, but there were plenty of freighters to carry them.

Soon they too, hurried off after secondary targets, aiming to attack them in basically the same ways they had attacked the first 3 planets.

Cain's 3 attack groups wasted no time.

Zokra IV- a former world of the Zorkaelian empire but now another major Cylon world, was also successfully attacked as a secondary target.

So was Darnel III - the former home-world of the Yorgul, who were similar to slightly-melted wax statues of humanoids, with triple wrists and prehensile tails, before the Cylons wiped them out and took over their world.

Rindale III - the former home-world of the Rinn, who had been tentacled lizards before the Cylons took over their world and eradicated them, also got attacked by Cain's forces.

Those 3 attacks went largely the same as the first 3, with the same tactics and similar results.

The 7th, and last, major Cylon planet was simultaneously attacked as well, though only by a couple of formerly-Cylon freighters. They pulled up to the planet, acting the whole while like innocent Cylon ships, and each 'delivered' some Raiders.

Since it was not known if the planet manufactured Raiders or not, the numbers had to be kept small to avoid suspicion.

But it was felt that a small number of Raiders would not be threatening, and could have multiple possible explanations, such as being delivered for repair, or being new models sent to be copied. Whatever explanation for them that the Cylons imagined, their uncertainty should give the Raiders enough time to land instead of being shot out of hand.

The Cylons couldn't ask, because, again, communications were being jammed.

So 36 Raiders, or 3 patrols, launched from each freighter and descended to the planet.

While the Raiders descended, the freighters simply turned and left, in the calm sedate manner freighters usually use when making deliveries.

But when the Raiders got near the ground, each dropped a number of parachutes, then headed towards its designated target and exploded. These explosions were somewhat smaller than usual for remote-controlled Raiders, since some explosives had been removed to make room for the parachute loads.

Each parachutes carried either a box full of weapons, or an Ootuul volunteer who had been trained to use those weapons - though the Ootuul could fly, it wasn't known what their altitude ceiling was, so the parachutes were there as backups.

With the limited intelligence of the Ootuul, it wasn't easy to train them, or to be clear enough for most ideas. But the Ootuul were very clear on the idea that they'd get to kill Cylons, after showing other Ootuul how to use the weapons so they could help.

The Ootuul were very excited about killing the hated Cylons.

And this was their home planet, which they simply called Dirt, though the humans called it Dirt IV, since it was the 4th world orbiting its sun.

It would have been cruel to set the Ootuul up for failure, so the remote-controlled explosive Raiders took out mainly ground bases and fighter bases, to make it possible that the upcoming insurrection would succeed.

And further raids were planned, both to support the Ootuul, and to keep hurting the Cylons generally.

Since it would have been suicide to try the same kind of raid after the Cylons had seen it once - they'd be warned and ready for it - Cain's forces sped off to raid other things for a short time.

The Cylons had many outposts and some minor planets that Cain had ideas for attacking.

And before any human ship left a Cylon system, they left sensor buoys and a couple jamming buoys. The jammers were to sit idle until the sensor buoys told them that a group of Raiders was approaching the planet. In such a case, they'd turn on and jam communications. This was just to keep the Cylons guessing about whether any given group of Raiders was safe or not. If enough uncertainty could be generated thereby, it was possible that they'd even shoot some of their own Raiders. At least their operations would be slowed down by extra verification procedures.

As they moved around, all the human forces scattered sensor buoys behind them, both to get further readings on the Cylon planets, and because anything they could see, the Planetary Pulsars on Antila or Tairac could shoot.

No Cylon ships survived for long once they were spotted and targeting coordinates for them transmitted to a Planetary Pulsar.

The Frigates, still raiding Cylon shipping in 2 groups of 3, were also dropping sensor buoys as they went, with the goal of making all of Cylon-controlled space a no-fly zone.

As the sensor net grew, first a few, then more, Cylon ships were destroyed by distant Planetary Pulsars.

The dramatic story had everyone in the fleet talking nonstop - even temporarily forgetting about the possible contact with Earth.

All available technicians began analyzing the sensor data on the Cylon planets, to try to aid Cain in planning further raids, and to try to figure out how capable those planets still were.

But very soon, most folks forgot about Cain and Cylons and Earth came to the fore again.


	26. Chapter 26

Chapter 26

Starbuck and Apollo had returned to Galactica with another Earth ship, and a story.

This new Earth ship was a warship called a destroyer, though it was still small enough to land in Galactica's shuttle bay.

It was basically vulture shaped - long and and narrow for the most part, getting about twice as wide back by its wings.

It's extremely long neck, about half of it's overall length of 60 metrons, was barely wider than a Vipers wingtips - only about 4 metrons wide.

It formerly belonged to a group called the Eastern Alliance on a planet they called Terra, which meant Earth.

People were excited about that name, but less excited when they heard about the actions of the Eastern Alliance Enforcers who had crewed the destroyer.

Apollo, Starbuck, and the 6 people of the Terran ship had gone to a planet called Paradeen, where the 6 people - Michael, Sara, and 4 children - planned to live.

The planet was almost uninhabited, because the Eastern Alliance had attacked it, peaceful and unarmed though it was, with chemical and biological weapons several weeks previously.

This fact completely appalled the Colonials of the ragtag fleet.

After most of the human race - over 40 billion inhabitants between the 12 Colonies - had been wiped out by Cylon attacks, only about 1 person in 40,000 had survived. Those survivors had a visceral reaction when it came to any further killing of humans, or anything like it. It was widely felt that there were simply too few humans left - they simply couldn't afford to allow any avoidable killing, oppression, or any other behavior that put you in the category they called the Enemies of Man.

And killings and oppression were apparently par for the course with the Eastern Alliance.

While Starbuck and Apollo were off exploring an empty city on Paradeen looking for information, the Eastern Alliance destroyer had landed looking for information about the 2 Vipers sitting on the planet.

Twelve enforcers, led by a man called Commandant Leiter, left the destroyer and went looking for that information. They'd found the 4 children, and the very first thought expressed by Commandant Leiter was to torture the children to get the information he wanted.

Half the children had escaped and run a neighbor's farm nearby, while Commandant Leiter and his men took over the farm where Sara was, and started working her over for information too.

Before they actually started any torture, Apollo, Starbuck, and some neighbors attacked and stunned all the enforcers. But it was clear to everybody that torture had been planned. The Eastern Alliance definitely seemed to be led, and at least sometimes supported, by Enemies of Man.

Apollo and Starbuck had brought the captive Eastern Alliance enforcers, and their destroyer, back to Galactica.

While gone, Apollo and Starbuck had had many stories related to them about Paradeen, Terra, and 11 farming worlds colonized to help feed Terra. These farming worlds were seen as 'satellites' to Terra, as far as being subservient to it. And Luna was the name of Terra's real satellite - its moon.

Consequently, the farming planets had been named Lunar 1 through Lunar 11.

On the way back to Galactica, the Eastern Alliance men had talked incessantly about their ideology, in which they clearly had been thoroughly indoctrinated. That ideology was as simple as it was evil - that the strong should rule and the weak should serve, in master-servant relationships at all levels of society.

They believed they were entitled to whatever they could conquer or otherwise take.

The 10 professional politicians of the Council were eager to talk to them.

They felt that if only negotiations were handled by professionals such as themselves rather than warriors, who they called 'primitive ruffians', everything would turn out all right. They said - in so many words and despite the lack of any supporting evidence - that they felt that the only reason the Eastern Alliance had acted badly was that the Colonial Warriors had started it.

Alfred made it a policy to avoid anything Council except official meetings, so he missed the negotiating meeting.

Adama was often too busy with military matters to be there except for official Council official meetings, and he didn't even make it to all of those.

Though he'd probably have missed this meeting anyway in protest, since the Council had assigned him an overseer - a Council member to stand by him at all times and second-guess everything he did, vetoing everything she felt the Council would disagree with. This they did because Adama had let Apollo and Starbuck defy the Council and take the first Earth ship away to Paradeen, instead of keeping it for study.

So when the Eastern Alliance enforcers and their leader were brought to the 'neutral ground' of their own destroyer in Galactica's shuttle bay to meet with the Council, neither Alfred, nor Adama, nor his overseer were there.

And that is what saved them from being captured.

After the 9 Council members filed in to the destroyer and took seats, the Eastern Alliance men calmly locked the airlock, declared the Council were captives now, tied them up, and started issuing demands to Galactica.

Then, they started torturing the Council members to get all the information they could, despite promises to Galactica that, if their demands were met, the Council would be released unharmed.

They were just as trustworthy as they were kind.

They tried to launch their destroyer and flee, but before the Council had demanded it be made available for negotiations, it had been under study. So certain components had already been disassembled and removed for examination, and consequently the craft's engines would not start.

Alfred wanted to send soldiers and launch an immediate assault on the destroyer to recapture the Eastern Alliance men, end the threat, and, coincidentally though somewhat grudgingly, rescue the Council.

But Adama's overseer ruled out everything but negotiations. In reality this meant that she insisted that the demands of the Eastern Alliance men be met.

To meet their demands, certain part of teh destroyer needed to be re-installed.

While one tech was outside the destroyer re-installing part of an engine, he attached a listening device to the destroyer's hull, which could hear everything happening therein and transmit it to Adama.

Adama wasted no time, after hearing the Council members screaming while being tortured, to order an assault.

His warriors used explosives to blast their way through the hull of the destroyer, in 3 places, then charge in. This caught the Eastern Alliance men offguard, and the warriors had no trouble taking the destroyer.

Though, in a final act of spite, the torturers killed their victims.

Adama's overseer wouldn't believe it until she had seen it, and she rushed there before anyone had time to clean it up.

She took one look and went catatonic.

Efforts to revive her failed, so she was declared unfit for service and her seat on the Council was opened for elections, as were the 9 others.

Alfred went all-out in campaigning for practical people, though with little hope that it would do any good.

Sally ran all-day every-day broadcasts of her reality shows, with plenty of new material, much of it aimed specifically at the election, plus re-runs of favorite older material to fill in the time.

She included frequent replays of Cain's speech where he resigned his seat on the Council and lambasted the membership thereof as impractical fools who had no business running anything.

She broadcast these things to all the game units as usual, but also got permission from Adama to spend some of the official inter-ship communication bandwidth on the project as well.

Meanwhile, Alfred's people and Adama's techs examined the Eastern Alliance destroyer thoroughly.

It didn't take them long to crack their computers - while the Eastern Alliance probably felt their computer security was top notch, it, like most of their technology, was centuries behind that of the 12 Colonies.

The Eastern Alliance barely had space travel - it took their ships months to reach their colonies, while Galactica could make the same trip in less than an hour.

The cracked computers divulged much information, including the coordinates of Terra.

So Galactica and the fleet set off for Terra.

They arrived, but did nothing to announce themselves. And they stayed well back so that they would not be especially noticeable.

This was so that they could eavesdrop on all transmissions coming from any source on Terra, and get an idea what they were dealing with.

While sorting through that, plus the contents of the destroyer's computer, the first batch of Wanderer scouts were commissioned and launched, and a second batch were started.

Two dozen Wanderers scouted in the vicinity of the fleet, while the rest went off to scout for Cain.

Cain was continually raiding the Cylons. A continual series of news announcements came back about various attacks he'd done, in which he used every variety of tactics he'd used at the Bushwhack system and elsewhere.

Alfred heard that Cain was doing well, though he didn't have time just then to follow the news.

Then the election for the new Council was completed.

Alfred couldn't believe the results - a bare majority of non-politicians had actually been elected.

Sally's 5 newly elected Reality Stars, plus Adama and Alfred, would make 7 of the 12 Council that actually had common sense.

At least Alfred hoped they all retained their common sense. Getting elected could change them.

Though they seemed likely to be resistant to that - the folks who had been changed by becoming famous, had been weeded out as that happened. Mostly they'd become one kind of jerk or another and consequently had their show's popularity drop until the show was canceled.

So the folks that remained Reality Stars had all weathered the change from anonymity to popularity, leading to high hopes that they would weather this change as well.

Alfred certainly had no hope that any of the 5 career politicians who had also been elected would have any sense at all.

He looked forward to the first meeting of the new Council.

In the meantime, he got back to work.

His latest project was in deciding what could be done with the destroyer they'd captured from the Eastern Alliance.

Adama was insistent, and Alfred agreed, that any nation whose representatives' first thought, on meeting children, was to torture them for information - that nation was not going to get any extra power to abuse while Adama had anything to say about it. And every military unit contributed to the power of a nation.

So that nation was not going to get the destroyer back, and consequently it was being examined to see if it could be any use to the Colonials.

The EA destroyer was much much smaller than a Frigate, though bigger than a Wanderer scout. So it had a little usable space, though not a lot.

And it was built with comparatively ancient technology.

Its engines were pathetic, slow and inefficient. It was neither fast, nor maneuverable, nor built well enough to stand much in the way of acceleration.

It's sensors were not even a fraction as good as those commonly built into Colonial shuttles - and those shuttles' main job did not demand much in the way of sensors, so they got only very simple sensor suites.

And it's weapons were mainly simple missiles, and a few very weak lasers not even a twentieth as powerful as the ones commonly mounted on a LandRam.

So it was an unimpressive vessel all-around.

Still, the hull, at least, was usable, even though it was completely unarmored and unable to resist any damage, by Colonial standards at least.

It was, after all, a space-going vessel with all the systems that required.

They'd just have to figure out if it could be used as it was, or if an upgrade or two could make it usable, and if so, how.

They were still looking into that when it came time for the next Council meeting.

It was an odd meeting - the new members were clearly split. The 5 career politicians were in ornate Council robes and sat on one side of the table, while the Reality Stars were in ordinary everyday clothes and sat on the other side of the table.

The politicians clearly felt at home in the environment of an official meeting of the Council in the Council chamber. And the Reality Stars did not, though - used to being Reality Stars - they still wore their video cameras, as was usual for them.

They, and the politicians, were used to having cameras around, so Alfred and Adama were probably the only ones uncomfortable with being filmed that way.

The Reality Stars generally approached the situation cautiously, wanting to 'test the waters with a toe rather than jump right in', so to speak. They were mostly quiet while they figured things out.

But the career politicians jumped right in, rapidly proposing several things such as pay raises for certain classes of workers, new uniforms for Warriors, building a new ship for a certain kind of animal to thrive in, and unit designations for new Viper squadrons.

What that last one was proposed, Alfonse - a Reality Star who was currently a factory worker and had been a construction worker back on the Colonies, and who was famous on his show for constantly joking around - raised his hand and asked.

"What business is that of ours - can't Cain choose his own squadron names and numbers?""

Apparently he was not yet comfortable enough with the situation to try joking.

Each of the career politicians, and only them, replied, at first stumbling over each-other and then reverting to formal rules of procedure and taking turns.

The responses, in their various forms, amounted to "You're ignorant of How Things Are Done, let me take you under my wing and show you the ropes". That came across as patriarchal at first, but as the meeting progressed, that kind of response wore thin and then came across as condescending attempts to dominate and control.

At one point a politician encouraged the 'newbies' not to be afraid to voice an opinion.

Marie answered for the group, by rhetorically asking

"How can I have a valid opinion before I fully understand the situation?""

The politicians' proposals were all voted down, on the basis incomplete information, but with the disclaimer that the issues could be brought up again once there had been a chance for everyone to familiarize themselves with the issues.

The "newbies" aka Reality Stars, generally took the position that you never make a change without fully understanding it first.

Alfonse summarized it with the words:

"Only a fool starts laying bricks before he knows how many he has, how many he will need, or even what he wants to build with them."

Alfred was refreshed to see someone actually referring to practical experiences as a yardstick for how to proceed. He was used to politicians that had lived solely in the world of ideas for so long that they thought they could pass irrational laws and have them work despite their impracticality. He'd once seen a politician who'd been told his plans couldn't work because they were "against the laws of physics" counter with "you tell me which laws and I'll get them repealed".

The first meeting of the new Council ended without much having been achieved. Despite the politicians eagerness to vote on things, the newbies voted against everything they didn't fully understand yet - which was all of it.

Alfred was satisfied with how the meeting went - it was his first Council meeting since getting elected where nothing stupid had been voted in.

He didn't have long to reflect on that though.

Dramatic events were happening.

On his shuttle ride back to LowBoy, out his window, he could see an amazing light-show over Terra.

He got the details about it as quickly as he could.

It turned out that the 2 factions on Terra - The Eastern Alliance and The People's Nationalist Alliance, which between them controlled the whole planet - had launched all-out attacks on each other using incredibly large numbers of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles.

If Galactica had not intervened and shot down all the missiles, all life on the planet could have been extinguished.

If Galactica had still been escorting unarmed ships, there would have been a temptation to leave, quietly and quickly, such a dangerous place.

But the remaining fleet all had laser turrets, and many had their own Vipers.

So Galactica and the fleet stayed in place while trying to figure out how to keep the vast number of humans on Terra from killing each-other.

Almost immediately after the ICBM's got shot down, the Eastern Alliance launched several dozen Destroyers, apparently to investigate what happened.

These soon detected Galactica, which had moved in closer the better to shoot down missiles.

Having been seen, Galactica tried to contact them on the frequencies they were known to use. It was time for that, and any further contact would be open, rather than the stealthy observations they had been doing.

But the destroyers did not reply.

Instead they attacked Galactica, or tried to.

Their lasers were so weak they could not do any real damage.

And as soon as their intent was clear, Galactica shot them all using her laser turrets set on stun.

That setting temporarily overloaded systems on ships and set them drifting without power.

So Galactica, demonstrating her maneuverability, simply flew carefully up to each one and scooped it into a landing bay, where Warriors were waiting to open the captured destroyers and take the crew prisoner.

Galactica could easily scoop up such ships, but she could not hold many and still have room for her Vipers.

So the BattleSphere was moved up and the destroyers were transferred to the cavernous bays it had on Shell 2.

While they were doing that, they got a call from The People's Nationalist Alliance. They wanted to meet and negotiate.

A special session of the Council was called to discuss the idea.

In that meeting, the career politicians were excited to demonstrate their expertise at negotiations, while the rest were suspicious of the situation, especially the fact that the The People's Nationalist Alliance, or Nationalists as they were more simply known, insisted on meeting on the planet's surface.

The Council meeting turned unfriendly fairly quickly, with the career politicians effectively implying that the newbies were cowards - either afraid, or too inexperienced, to do their jobs.

But the newbies wouldn't budge - there were not going down to a potentially hostile planet without better information at the very minimum.

So the career politicians, 4 of the 5 of them anyway, decided to go anyway and 'show the unqualified how it was done'.

The 5th protested ill health on the grounds that it would be 'unconscionable for him to carry a virus or germ to the surface, which the inhabitants may have no resistance to'.

He didn't seem ill, and may have just been trying to stay behind, though with a believable excuse.

As they walked out of the meeting, Councilwoman Lara, a Reality Star diver who worked in the big aquarium at the center of the BattleSphere, commented to Councilman Yosh, another Reality Star:

"Why is it that I feel they are putting words in my mouth which I never said nor intended? Worse yet, they denounce those words in a way that makes it appear that I am a fool, even though they are not my words, nor my thoughts. I am not a coward."

Alfred didn't hear the rest as each went their separate ways.

The 4 career politicians requested a shuttle from Galactica, since they had not been yet assigned their own.

Adama asked Alfred if he had any readily available, since Galactica's bays were still crowded with captured destroyers.

And Alfred dug out of storage, one of the thousand yahren old shuttles they'd recovered from Proteus, which was only a little more advanced than what the Terrans had.

He, too, suspected the Nationalists, and didn't want to hand them any new technology, if they decided to keep the shuttle.

Shortly after that shuttle entered Terra's atmosphere, the Nationalists informed Galactica that the shuttle had crashed and all aboard were presumed dead, though a search was being made.

Alfred was worried, until Adama pointed out that Galactica's scanners had been on the shuttle the whole time and showed it landing successfully, after which it was put in a hangar and the Councilmen taken to the entrance of an underground transportation network, which could have transported them anywhere.

It was clear the Councilmen had been captured and that there was no intention of returning them.

Galactica's scanners were looking for them, trying to find the signatures of their hand-held computers, but that would take time.

Meanwhile, massive numbers of Eastern Alliance destroyers had been gathering above Terra. When they got 1500 together, they swept in and attacked.

It proved to be no harder to shoot them all down than it had been to shoot down a much larger number of ICBM's.

Collecting the stunned and disabled craft took quite a long time, especially since each was full of thoroughly indoctrinated and fanatical soldiers.

It also took a while to work out a procedure to take them all alive, without losses among the warriors.

Since they didn't want to take any risks, they used large amounts of knockout gas, then sent in tripod lasers firing continuously on stun. That left the Enforcers very thoroughly stunned, but was better than risking any Warriors.

During that time, they redirected half of the two dozen Wanderer scouts which had been examining the nearby area, and sent them to Lunar 1 through 11, plus Paradeen, to check on conditions there and report.

The other dozen Wanderers continued their general surveys of the nearby area.

And Alfred's people came up with a proposal for what to do with the captured destroyers.

As-is, they were effectively useless - too slow and inefficient to even make good shuttles. And their layout wasn't suited to freight anyway - too many structural members would have to be changed to make that work. It'd be better to simply build new ships from scratch instead.

To upgrade them as any kind of fighting ships would also be more complicated and time consuming than simply rebuilding them from scratch - almost everything would have to be changed to give them any real maneuverability in the first place, much less brace them to survive the stress of such maneuvers.

But one kind of military ship could work.

To survive combat with anything modern, speed and maneuverability were needed most importantly, but also good armor, sensors, weapons, and a host of other things.

But there was a way to participate in and contribute to combat without ever getting near it: pulsars.

Each destroyer was big enough, barely, to house one pulsar and enough energy storage for 2 shots, assuming they also swapped out its engine for a pre-Marron drive.

Then they could either leave all the other pathetic systems in place, or, if they had the time and inclination, do things like upgrading their sensors and communications to be equal to those on a shuttle.

Individually they wouldn't be much, but in large numbers the effect could be significant.

And that was the only way these ships would ever be significant.

What decided them to upgrade the sensors and communications was the need to also upgrade the computers.

And they had that need because nobody wanted to fly them. That meant they needed a way to fly themselves if they were to fly at all. And that meant they needed CORA computers such as Recon Vipers had. And CORA wouldn't work without good sensors and communications.

So for each destroyer, they would build a pulsar, energy storage for it, a pre-Marron drive, and the same package they would normally build for a Recon Viper containing its sensors, communications, and computer.

It sounded like a lot, but it would be less than half as complicated and time consuming as building a similar ship from scratch, since the new parts were almost all off-the-shelf stuff. The only custom work would be a few small modifications to the bulkheads of each destroyer, and designing a set of energy storage cells to fit into each nook and cranny of the ship.

They got right on it, since having the ships fly along under their own power would get them out of the way and put them to use at the same time.

All the Liberty Ships were already set up to finish Wanderers as their partly-completed hulls came out of Fred the FRD in a continuous stream. They just ceased building new Wanderers for a while, and filled all the available capacity, both in the FRD and at the Liberty Ships, with destroyers undergoing conversion.

While Alfred was buried in that project, he paid some attention to the attempts to have professionals reason with, and hopefully socialize, the Eastern Alliance enforcers they'd captured on all those destroyers.

And more enforcers continued to trickle in, as destroyers attacked the Wanderer scouts on the way to, and at, each of the 'satellite' colonies of Terra - Lunar 1 through 1, as well as Paradeen.

The Wanderers had no trouble defeating the destroyers and capturing them, but towing them back was getting time-consuming, so some Liberty Ships went out to meet them and take over the towing. These got attacked too, and similarly captured the attacking destroyers, demonstrating by deeds what the sociologists were learning in interviews with the prisoners - they were so thoroughly indoctrinated as to be totally unreachable by reason, and they never gave up struggling to 'succeed' as their ideology defined it - by conquering.

What to do with them was not a simple problem. If they dropped them back on Terra, they'd pick up the struggle again as best they could, probably oppressing their neighbors while they were at it. And neither was there a prison big enough to hold them, nor would it have been a good idea to support them in a prison indefinitely.

Someone suggested they be made to support themselves in a kind of prison.

So a suitable planet was chosen - one they'd passed by not too long ago and which could be farmed, but which was too far for Terrans to travel to with their own technology.

It was named Sylvania, after it's mostly sylvan territory, and after the farming that would go on there.

It had only about 25% land area, but that was well watered and temperate over most of its surface, resulting in over 39 million square miles of farm-able area. Even allowing a full square mile each, it could accommodate about 39 million prisoners - many more than they could imagine needing.

So they started sending shiploads of prisoners there, to be marooned with a few simple, unpowered tools, plenty of seeds, food, and a 'how to' book each - actually printed on durable plastic pages rather than give them anything technological.

Each prisoner was set down, with his equipment, a mile from any others, so they'd be on their own. After the first few, they took to lowering each new prisoner and their equipment on ropes, so there would be no possibility that existing prisoners would travel, band together, and try to capture a shuttle doing a new delivery. With the rope-delivery method, if they tried that, the rope could simply lowered faster until it touched ground, then detached, allowing the shuttle to escape, never having come within 50 metrons of the ground.

The plan was to have no contact with the people of Sylvania, so that they could live simple lives without bothering, or being bothered by, anyone. To that end, they left some sensor buoys and defense satellites around the planet, and declared it off-limits.

Defense satellites were not terribly effective against fighters, but they should be adequate to prevent any other visits, whether from folks intending to free the prisoners, pirates, or any other kind of visitor.

There on Sylvania, they could live out their lives, as they chose, without harming anyone - at least no one who wasn't just as guilty. And maybe they'd even come to some realizations while they were at it. That was the hope.

In a few generations, after their simple existence had driven their ideologies out of their minds, Sylvania could even become a productive colony.

Without warning, the Galactica's scans finally found the kidnapped Councilors on the surface of Terra.

A flight of Vipers was sent in to strafe everything in their vicinity on stun setting. And a shuttle full of Warriors landed, retrieved them and returned.

They told a harrowing story. The survivors did anyway - 2 of the 4 had died while being tortured for information.

That was bad enough, but theere was more.

What they thought was an opportunity to escape, aided by a fellow prisoner, was actually an elaborate ploy by the Nationalist government to trick them into unlocking their personal computers. The 'fellow prisoner' had actually been a member of the Nationalist secret police, planted in prison just to 'earn their trust'. He'd led their escape, during which they'd 'just happened' to recover their computers, soon after which they had - not coincidentally at all - discovered a need to look up information. As soon as they'd unlocked their computers to do so, the secret policeman pounced and re-arrested them, eager to look through the now-unlocked computers.

But that computer use had also enabled Galactica to find them.

The news outraged the people of the fleet, who generally felt that such evil had to be stopped.

Talk in the Council, for which new elections to fill the 2 empty seats had already been started, was pretty unequivocal.

Alfred particularly liked the exchange between Councilwoman Marie, and Councilman Yosh.

Marie said, "There's a government down there that arbitrarily arrests its own people, disposes of any who have information which they don't want getting out, routinely lies to its own populace through an official propaganda arm as well as in other ways, encourages its own citizens to turn in other citizens to the secret police, and rewards them for doing so, and...nevermind. The list is to horrible. It has to stop. That government must go."

"You're right." Yosh agreed, "It must stop, if only for the torture alone."

"That's mostly the other government - I was talking about the supposed 'good guys' - the Nationalists."

Agreement was general, the vote nearly unanimous, and planning began.

Cain was contacted for his opinion as well.

It was pointed out that, with the continual attacks from one faction, and the kidnapping and killing of high government officialls by the other faction, the fleet was already at war with the whole planet Terra.

A Reality Star, arguing on his show for intervention, said "Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.", and that became their battle cry.

So Galactica, and the Colonials of the ragtag fleet, took over the planet Terra, and, soon after that, all its 'satellite worlds'.

It proved to be surprisingly easy, in most ways.

Galactica's sensors had long since noted the locations of the centers of government, even their hidden underground bunkers, since these still transmitted plenty of commands and such.

So targeted strikes by Vipers, strafing with lasers set to stun, silenced all defenses.

Shuttles full of troops attacked, stunned, and captured the leadership on both sides.

Then the Colonials declared themselves to be in charge of the planet now. They listed the reforms they intended to pass and the order and pace at which they would pass them.

They made sure to keep strictly to the schedule they promised, so folks could learn that Colonial rule was benign.

They also declared that any serious or violent opposition would be banished for life.

Comparatively few people ended up needing to be banished.

Most of the people could be retrained, though they had been indoctrinated to, and lived in, all kinds of oppression for decades or longer.

But the leaders, and a few others, were found to be beyond the help the Colonials could provide.

The former leaders of both countries were sent off to farm on Wasteland - a mostly desert planet near Sylvania. Despite being mostly desert, it had enough good farm-able land for almost a million people, at one per square mile.

Any who were found rioting or fomenting rebellion went off to farm on Sylvania.

Some groups managed to gather unseen, and attack the centers of the new leadership on Terra. These were simply strafed on stun and banished to Sylvania as well.

And a new proclamation went out, that any public gathering of more than 6 people, would be stunned and questioned.

Further opposition was just private muttering, which petered out as people realized how much better off they were under the new laws.

That realization came faster in the former Nationalist territory than in former Eastern Alliance territory, both because the people living under the Eastern Alliance had been more oppressed - and more indoctrinated to think that was normal - and because they had been oppressed for much longer than the Nationalist citizens had.

The Nationalists had actually had freedom during the lives of some of the current generation. But they had gradually lost it - mostly under the excuse of increased security to oppose the Eastern Alliance. So bit by bit, they'd lost their freedoms. Now, for every little thing, they had to be granted permission through paperwork, processes, and permits.

So, before Galactica arrived, the Nationalists were almost as thoroughly oppressed as their enemies were.

People even needed permits, yahrens of training classes and internships, and a certification involving tests, before doing such simple things as massaging pets.

Since the people were used to such absurd restrictions on freedom, it would take a long time for them to get used to having freedom again. And it would take every available Colonial to teach them, and administer their planets until they were capable of doing it better.

Colonial society was not perfect, but it was far better than anything the Terrans had had.

To prevent the 5 billion plus Terrans from simply swamping the votes of the not-quite-1-million Colonials, no Terran would be allowed to vote until they had adequately socialized. Extending the vote to Terrans was projected to start in 15 yahrens, and would then be phased in over time: it often took a long time to unlearn things that had been learned and practiced for a long time.

They were honest and up-front with the Terrans about it, and protests were minimal - they weren't used to having any real say in government anyway.

Similarly, until they could be trusted to have left behind their old ways, Terra and her colonies would not get any technological advances from the Colonials.

It would be a very long process to civilize the inhabitants of Terra, teach them to live better than they had before, and generally bring them up to the standards of the 12 Colonies. But it had begun.


	27. Chapter 27

Chapter 27

Meanwhile, quite a bit had happened.

Most of the converted destroyers had launched with their new pulsar weapons, and headed off to join Cain's forces.

Two new Councilors had been elected - both Reality Stars, giving the practical people a solid majority in the Council. And the practical people had settled into their roles and become comfortable with their roles.

But they were still tentative about voting in any kind of changes - they wanted to completely understand them first. So Cecil and other lawyers were invited in to discuss possible changes.

Then all that got put in hold while dealing with a new excitement - a Wanderer scout had found Earth. It was not far beyond Terra's furthest 'satellite world'.

While there was universal excitement, most of the people and ships of the fleet were too busy at Terra and her satellite worlds to go to Earth immediately.

But Galactica was much faster than the rest, so she surged forward to Earth, pausing only to make sure the whole Council of 12 was aboard.

It didn't take long to arrive at Earth.

Their disappointment was stunning.

Until they found Earth, Terra was the most socially messed-up human world they'd ever seen.

But Earth surpassed it by a very wide margin.

Every sort of social problem was not just present on Earth, but commonplace.

And that was probably why their technology level was centuries behind even that of Terra.

The Council, assembled together for what was supposed to be a joyous occasion, watched in stunned silence as broadcasts from Earth came in and played continuously.

Galactica and the Wanderer had not made their presence known.

Instead, wanting to be informed before just jumping right in, they'd tapped in to every kind of transmission being made from the planet, recording it all.

They started watchiing public news and entertainment broadcasts. But as the situation developed, they cracked the encryption on all kinds or private broadcasts as well, and watched them too, just to be certain. They wanted to give the Earthlings every possible chance to disprove what was becoming more and more obvious by the centon - they were barbarians in every sense of the word.

They watched the private transmissions for a while, hoping they'd indicate the public broadcasts were wrong - perhaps some kind of sick entertainment or something. But they proved the opposite - what the braodcasts were saying was all too real.

After a long time, one of the career politicians on the Council broke the silence, saying:

"Well, they have all the same inherent rights as the people of Terra, so we need to civilize them too, but where do we even start?"

After a moment to think, Councilwoman Marie responded:

"Helping Terra was the right thing to do, but circumstances are different here. Not only are they much worse off, needing far more help, but we have far less to give - almost none in fact: all our available resources are committed at Terra."

"You're suggesting that we should be hypocrites!" blurted the politician.

"No," sighed Marie, "I'm suggesting we face reality as it is, rather than pretending it was as we wished it to be. Yes, they need help. No, we haven't got help to give. If we try with insufficient resources, we'll just make the situation worse. If we take resources from Terra, we'll make both situations worse. No. Sadly, Earth must wait."

"This is unconscionable - you're suggesting we ignore their desperate plight!"

"Have you ever heard the saying that 'if you bite off more than you can chew, you'll choke'?" She asked, "Terra was all we could manage and they had only 2 nations. Earth has almost 200 - most of them at least as messed up as Terra."

"She's right." Councilman Yosh volunteered "Ideals are nice, but you have to keep practicality in mind - if you try too many things at once, you fail at all of them. If it helps you understand, think of a parachute - parachutes work fine if you have enough cloth to make it work. But don't even try to parachute if you have only a little cloth. And don't take a working parachute and cut it in half thinking that makes 2 workable parachutes. It doesn't. It makes for 2 dead parachutists. In this case, our resources - mostly people - are like that parachute cloth. We haven't any to spare for helping Earth. Trying with too little is a great way to fail. And taking some from Terra is a great way to make both fail."

There were murmurs of agreement around the room among the Councilors who were Reality Stars - all of whom were proving to be practical reasonable people.

The career politicians saw where the majority opinion was, so they stayed silent. Career politicians certainly know how to pretend to fit in.

After some discussion, it was decided to leave 2 Wanderers and some Sensor Buoys at Earth. They were to remain undetected and quietly record all transmissions of every type, so the fleet could analyze them when resources became available to do so. With those, in time, they could start figuring how to untie the knots the planet had tied itself in.

There was hope that at least one of the almost 200 nations on Earth would be civilized enough that the Colonials could quietly help them to advance and eventually make progress at civilizing their own planet.

But, to make sure to get it right, they'd do a lot of monitoring before starting any help, even assuming they found a nation or two that were worth helping.

In the meantime, Galactica sped back to Terra to share the news.

Things at Terra were progressing, but would take a long time before they got to where they should be.

Meanwhile, they no longer needed a warship there. The ships of the ragtag fleet, with the armaments they had, were more than strong enough to handle any threat the Terrans could bring - even if another thousand destroyers were hidden somewhere.

And the Cylons were no longer chasing the fleet - they seemed to be fully engaged defending their worlds from Cain's constant raids.

And Cain - fully engaged in Battles with the Cylons - could use the help.

So Galactica left the fleet - with the Firebases just in case of unexpected needs - at Terra, and sped off by herself at top speed to join Cain.

Before the Galactica left, the Council had a meeting, wherein the first vote proposed by practical people was passed. In it, they decided that communications techniques were more than adequate to allow Council members to split up and yet still participate in Council meetings by video conference call.

So the previous rule - that all the Council had to stay close in order to meet in person - was suspended, so that Adama could go off to war in Galactica, while other Councilors could stay with their families in the fleet.

And that vote 'broke the ice' so to speak.

Now that the new Reality Stars on the Council had proposed a measure of their own, and passed it, they went ahead and passed several others.

Some new things were voted in, and some old things restored.

Many things had been suggested when the Council met with Cecil and other lawyers. Some of these now got voted in. Cecil's suggestions were the ones they mainly went with. He was a practical guy too, who knew how to speak in layman's terms and actually get his ideas across, unlike most other lawyers who like to try to impress you with how many obscure words they know.

So it was one of Cecil's suggestions that got voted in first. He called it the "vote strength act", and it simply said that any vote by a Council could only be overturned by a larger vote. So, for example, if a measure passed with 7 votes, it would take 8 votes to overturn it. Unanimous votes could only be overturned by unanimous votes.

Cecil had suggested it because there was no guarantee of always having a sensible Council. He said they should use the opportunity while they had it, since many types of people were now trying to duplicate their success by seeking fame in some form, mainly by starting their own reality tv shows.

He said the human race had come very close to being wiped out by a bad Council decision - twice counting Carillon - and it was time to end that possibility.

He pointed out that they'd had bad Councils for a long time now - even before the 12 Colonies had been wiped out but especially so since then, while Martial Law had given them extra power.

He said the reason for that was because the Council had become powerful, and bad sorts of people are the ones who want power the most. In the past, the government had been set up such that planetary governments had far more power, and the Council far less than they did recently, but that gradually power had been taken from planetary governments and given to the Council.

The Council used to have power over inter-planetary trade, disputes, and the defense of all the planets, and little else.

They also enforced the simple general laws in the Charter of Humanity - a plainly worded 3 page document that applied to all planets, guaranteeing, for example, the right for anyone to leave any planet unless fleeing criminal justice.

Planetary governments handled everything else, but only within their planet.

With such a system, individual planets may go bad and become oppressive, like Terra had, but that was limited by people's right to leave. Planetary governments had to keep themsleves in check or their populations would emigrate and leave them in charge of little or nothing.

It wasn't a perfect system, but it had worked well for a few thousand yahrens before it had been subverted.

So, in a series of votes the new Council voted to restore things as they used to be, with the Council having little power, and the planetary governments having more.

But first they added a new law and an old law, since they wouldn't be able to after limiting their own power.

The new law was simple. They made it a requirement for members of the Council, or planetary governments, to have spent more of their adult lives working in practical fields than in the realm of ideas. They generally described what counted as what, then listed out dozens of examples.

So, for instance, if you'd spent 6 yahrens working as a philosopher, teacher, lawyer, or politician, then, to qualify for a high political office, you'd have to have spent 7 yahrens or more as a farmer, construction worker or similar kind of job, and the practical work had to be more recent than the idea work.

The idea was that certain jobs, by their nature, gave you tons of practical feedback as to what was a good idea and could work, and what was a bad idea and could not work. Other jobs - those focused in the realm of ideas, gave no such feedback and enabled people to believe all sorts of bad or even self-contradictory ideas. Not everybody in those jobs gave themselves over to bad ideas, but, since there was no inherent negative feedback for doing so, many did.

People who were out of touch with reality had no business leading anything, and this law was aimed to prevent that.

The other law was another return to older ways of doing things. The 12 Colonies had, early in their history, recognized that those with no vested interest in society often vote without thinking it through very well.

There had even been cases, early on, like a pet cat being elected mayor of Talkeetna, or a cow being elected mayor of Eastsound, just because teenagers thought it was funny.

And there had been numerous cases of people voting to spend more money than there was, or voting to borrow money to spend now, only to have to pay back later far more than they'd borrowed.

People with a vested interest in society - meaning they'd worked hard to achieve something and now, having achieved it, wanted to protect it - people like property owners - tended to be far more careful in what they'd vote for. This, generally, resulted in far more sensible laws.

Teenagers with no assets and without yet having achieved anything, have nothing to lose if a wild 'hail mary' vote turned out badly.

People who'd worked hard for something - a business, a home, or a degree for example - tended to shy away from wildly 'rolling the dice' to see how a wild idea actually worked out.

So the Council voted to go back to that way of doing things as well - where legal residents could not vote without becoming full citizens by achieving something.

That was the only difference between the 2 classes - both had all the same rights, except for voting.

They used the old lists of what achievements counted for citizenship.

In some of the Council votes, they even got the career politicians voting along with them. Apparently even they often wanted to be seen as part of the mainstream - joining the crowd to get along.

When they explained the new system to the fleet, it sparked mass interest in colonization, since everyone wanted to be their own masters, or at least choose a world to live on that had laws they liked.

Under the rules of the Martial Law they'd been living under, it was allowed to leave the fleet and create a new colony, but only if you could defend it effectively against the Cylons.

Most people had no way of doing that, which gave Alfred an idea.

He got working on something he called 'colony seeds' while he put Sally to work on looking over potential colonists.

Alfred could set up new colonies, but since he was 'financing' it, he could set conditions on participation.

Anybody joining a colony that Alfred started would be a volunteer, of course. But they would also agree to elect, at least once, a planetary government set up according to Cecil's parameters and run by people Sally selected.

If in 4 yahrens the new colony didn't like the results, they'd be free to set up any other kind of government and choose any other leaders.

He wanted to give them at least 4 yahrens of good government. He hoped that they'd like it and vote for more, but that would be entirely up to them.

Alfred's colony seeds were fairly simple to set up. Sixteen new pods were built with just their hulls. They were set up to be towed behind the 16 newest Liberty Ships - numbers 24 through 39. Those Liberty Ships were already set up for general construction, which would work well for new colonies.

Then construction equipment, farming equipment, tools, machines, seeds, all kinds of vehicles, pre-fab Planetary Pulsars - everything a new colony would need - was packed into the new empty pods and the Liberty Ships that would tow them.

Each new colony would get their pod left in orbit of their planet, while their Liberty Ship landed and became the nucleus of a new city. Shuttles would move things as needed between orbit and the planet surface.

The pod then would become orbital industry, making anything and everything the planet needed, but especially concentrating on anything whose creation involved the creation of pollution as a side-effect.

For any colonies which had more starting volunteers than one Liberty Ship could carry, additional Liberty Ships could shuttle some more people back and forth. But that shuttling would be temporary duty. The 16 Liberty Ships designated as colony seeds would each be dedicated to their own colony.

It was often odd how things worked out. Many of the volunteers wanted to stay with their own tribes. So the first 12 colonies ended up being New Gemon, New Virgon, New Scorpia, New Caprica, and so on - one for each tribe.

The other 4 new colonies were for those who were not so picky.

Alfred didn't mind letting that many Liberty Ships go, both because it gave him a chance to encourage a few colonies to start out right, and because Commander Cain was doing so well.

News had been continually streaming back to the fleet about Cain's raids.

In summary, in his first surprise attacks, each of the 7 major Cylon worlds had been hit, and had been devastated over half the planet's surface - the half that had faced Cain's forces at the time of the raid.

Further raids had been largely aimed at 3 things: keeping that half of the planet devastated, so that no effective rebuilding occurred, expanding the areas of devastation, and chipping away at the numbers of Cylon Raiders which the planet could launch.

Cylon warships were no longer a problem - the Planetary Pulsars shot them whenever they showed up, which was increasingly infrequent. So the Cylon planets depended on Raiders and fixed defenses.

Like a gardener fighting a pernicious weed, Cain had to keep hacking the Cylons back or they'd regrow fairly quickly, to be just as they'd been before he ever attacked.

Cain used all of his imagination to achieve his usual goals - divide the enemy and hit them where they didn't expect it. He ambushed some groups, lured others away, and so on.

When they gathered, he scattered, to temp them into splitting up to chase all his ships, or groups of ships.

When they scattered, he gathered, in secret, to ambush some of them.

He chipped away at their numbers, and their planetary defenses, in every way he could.

He had Recon Vipers, type 2a, dive-bomb planetary anti-ship defenses with small mines.

He had the SiegeSpheres, DE's, and MUPPETS pick away with their pulsars anytime Raiders launched from a planet.

He laid mines, ambushes and traps.

He swept near enough to the planets to lure Raiders into chasing him, and when he'd led them far enough, another group of ships would show up and bombard the planet's undefended side, then run again before the Raiders could get back.

He found all sorts of imaginative ways to infiltrate remote-control Raiders into groups of real Raiders during the confusion of battle. Mostly these would 'return to base' and land with the others, then explode and take out the base and many Raiders. Some 'crop-dusted' the planet with plague organisms they'd found on Antila.

Many plagues were native to Antila, some of which had proven to be deadly to Cylons as well. The humans had cures for the plagues which affected humans, but the Cylon-killing plagues were expected to be a surprise to the Cylons.

There had been a debate about whether to use plague organisms at all. But it was decided that biological warfare was frowned upon for 2 reasons: it could cause unnecessary suffering as a miserable death, and it was impossible to control or contain. Other than those, it was just like any other kind of killing.

In this case, the plagues they'd found only affected Cylons, so containment was not an issue. Besides, all these plagues were loose in the wild on Antila already. And from all accounts the diseases killed painlessly while the Cylon slept.

So it was judged to be no different than a laser or explosive - it killed & the dead don't care how they were killed.

Since the Cylons had started the war, and fought as hard as they could for a thousand yahrens to exterminate the humans, and proved that they meant it when they exterminated other races, they had effectively set the rules for the conflict - no holds barred.

So the humans didn't hold anything back either.

Cain especially targeted any ability the Cylons had for refueling their Raiders. The Cylons had vast manufacturing abilities, and were replacing lost Raiders almost as fast as they were lost. But not every planet had sources of tylium - in fact, almost none did. Planets like Carillon and Gomoray, with their own reserves of tylium available for mining, were very very rare.

All other planets had to ship tylium in.

The Cylons ability to fly ships anywhere had been steadily decreasing, as more and more scouts and sensor buoys got in place, and called in coordinates of any Cylon ships they saw to the waiting Planetary Pulsars, who swatted them with ease.

So it was rare for the Cylons to get any kind of shipments through.

The Cylons had quickly resorted to jamming both sensors and communications, to keep their ships hidden and therefore safe.

But the wily Cain had immediately responded. When anything went silent, whether sensor buoy or Wanderer scout, more Wanderers or, if possible, Recon Vipers were sent to the area.

The source of jamming was not normally something you could determine. But Cain had his Wanderers and Recon Vipers feel around, until they found the edges of the jamming. An area of jamming was usually pretty close to a sphere.

With a cloud of jamming surrounded by 3 or more scouts just outside of it, it didn't take much computing power to figure out what the center of the cloud was.

The coordinates they computed as being at the center of the jamming were then called in to a Planetary Pulsar.

A host of minor factors could leave the calculated coordinates off by a little either way, so sometimes it took a Planetary Pulsar up to about a dozen shots before it destroyed whatever was at the center of the jamming.

But still, they did destroy their targets.

That's how the Cylons ceased getting any new fuel shipments anywhere.

And Cain was doing his best to make them run out of whatever fuel stocks each planet had on hand.

When 10,000 Raiders launch from a planet, chase Colonial ships around a bit, then return and land, it burns up a lot of fuel.

And fuel storage tanks were a favorite target of Cain's raids.

Some Cylon planets had had more Raiders survive the first ambush than others.

To take best advantage of the situation, Cain, while keeping all Cylon planets until continual attack, concentrated on the planets with fewest surviving Raiders.

Dirt was one of those, and Cain's subsequent raids quickly got ahead of Dirt's ability to produce new fighters.

Soon enough, Dirt had few enough remaining fighters so that a frontal assault could work.

Cain raided it once more, luring its fighters well out away from the planet.

Both SiegeSpheres went in, with the Zorkaelian Battlecruiser accompanying them - keeping them between itself and the planet.

The planet launched a few hundred more fighters to attack the SiegeSpheres

But the Raiders mostly got hit by massed rail-gun fire from the dozen rapid-fire rail-guns on each of the 110 Artillery Crawler mark 2 on each SiegeSphere. The few Raiders that survived the first pass got hit by the Zorkaelian Battlecruiser as they circled around for another pass.

Shortly after that, the SiegeSpheres entered the range of the planet and the planet's newly built, hidden, anti-ship defenses opened up on them.

Heavy anti-ship lasers warmed their hulls, but only a little from each hit.

Heavy anti-ship missiles also reached out to the SiegeSpheres from the planet. While such missiles dodged really well, and normally had a good chance of successfully impacting their target, in this case there was nowhere to dodge to - rail-gun pellets filled the sky. Trying to dodge between them was like trying to dodge between raindrops in a heavy storm - no matter how you dodged nor how fast you went, you still got hit.

No planetary battery got to fire twice - after their first shots, they were identified, targeted, and destroyed by the anti-ship lasers which the SiegeSpheres mounted.

By the time the first group of Raiders - the one Cain had lured away - ran low on fuel and headed back towards the planet, the planet had lost all its remaining defenses.

The SiegeSpheres, along with the Zorkaelian Battlecruiser, were ready to meet the surviving Raiders.

Meanwhile, Cain had not been idle. He'd been chipping away at the group of Raiders using every tactic at his disposal, and was still doing so as they approached the planet.

It was still a large number of Raiders that attacked the 3 ships at the planet, but they had no real hope of succeeding. The SiegeSpheres merely warmed a trifle at every hit a Raider got with its lasers. And the Raiders could not approach the Battlecruiser and survive - any fighter or missile near it died: that was the point of its design, and was why the Cylons had used Puck class destroyers against the Zorkaelians, instead of anything that carried fighters.

Some Raiders survived long enough to land on the planet to try to refuel.

They didn't survive long after that. Orbital bombardment and strafing runs took them out easily.

Soon enough, shuttles full of weapons were being sent down to the natives of the planet - the Ootuul. They'd had enough weapons to train with, but not enough for a full-scale attack.

The humans did not have the numbers to assault a major world, but the Ootuul did. And they were more than happy to blast away at the hated Cylons, supported by ships in orbit and strafing Vipers. They'd been hiding in wilderness areas and training with the weapons the humans had sent. When Cain attacked the planet, that was the signal the Ootuul had been waiting for. They surged out and attacked.

Soon it was over and Dirt IV was back in Ootuul hands.

For the next planetary assault, Cain prepared to bring with him as many Ootuul as would volunteer.

This proved to be far more than his freighters could carry.

The Ootuul hated the Cylons, and wanted to free the Ootuul who had been shipped to all the other Cylon worlds to work as slaves.

There were so many Ootuul volunteers that they were able to get a separate group of Ootuul ready for each Cylon planet they planned to assault. That made it easier all around, since if they'd had only one group, they'd have to pick them up again for the next assault before they'd had time to be really thorough.

With separate groups, they could leave them on the planet a while to make sure.

Cain then moved to the next planet, Darnel III, and did it all again.

With 1 fewer Cylon planet to raid, Cain could hit the remaining planets more often, and with more ships. That fact counterbalanced the fact that Darnel III had more fighters remaining than Dirt IV had had.

This time the process went faster than at Dirt IV, because a construction project had been completed.

At Cain's request, Tairac and Antila had each doubled their numbers of Planetary Pulsars, building 4 more each.

Before, only 1, or, if he timed it right, 2 Planetary Pulsars on either planet could fire to support his attacks at any given moment.

But now with twice as many, if he timed it right, he could get 4 shots on target at once.

Before the upgrade, he could get 1 or 2 Planetary Pulsar hits to make massive explosions in the atmosphere of a target planet, destroying a few Raiders and throwing many around.

Now, after the upgrade, he arranged to have 4 hits from a Planetary Pulsar go off in the atmosphere of a target planet in a box formation around groups of Raiders rising to fight. This, instead of blowing the Raiders outward from 1 explosion, blew them inwards - towards each-other - from 4 surrounding explosions. So many of them ended up smashing into each-other as they spun and tumbled while trying to regain control.

In short, every time a massed group of Raiders launched to engage Cain's forces, those Raiders took heavy losses from the supporting Planetary Pulsars, firing in groups of 4.

That made it easier for Cain, since massed groups of thousands of Raiders were his main remaining opposition.

So, with the help of the Planetary Pulsars, Darnell III and Rindale III both fell to the same procedures that had worked at Dirt IV.

But at Zorkael II, the Cylons had so very many Raiders left, that vast numbers still survived the surprise 'box pattern' shots from the Planetary Pulsars. The number of remaining Raiders was too many to risk an assault, and further groups of Raiders, now knowing what happened if they stayed in tight groups when they launched, kept a very significant separation between them as they launched.

That kept their loses to the 'box pattern' shots far fewer, but it also split them up, making them prime targets for Cain's tactics.

So he chipped away at them for a brief time longer before help arrived.

The next time he attacked Zorkael II, Raiders, well separated from each other as usual, rose to chase him, and were surprised when 2088 of them exploded just after leaving the atmosphere. Then 1263 more - fewer this time because some had begun to dodge - exploded when the 2088 former Eastern Alliance destroyers lurking just outside the star system each fired their second shot.

After that, the assault worked as it had at the 2 previous planets. Cain's ships lured the remaining Raiders away from the planet, the SiegeSpheres and Battlecruiser moved in, defeated or resisted all opposition & then orbital bombardment of the planet was commenced in earnest.

After that, over a hundred thousand volunteer Ootuul were landed to hunt down the remaining Cylons.

While all 3 of those planets - Darnel III, Rindale III, and Zorkael II - had been taken by the Cylons from other races, no members of those races were found alive on them. The Cylons had apparently decided their value as slaves was insufficient, and had wiped them out.

Curiously, just as on Gomoray, captured Cylon hospitals had limited amounts of literature about maternity, and no equipment for it. Only adult Cylons were found on the planets as well.

Not sure what it meant, the fleet kept acting as it had been.

Zonark III fell to the same kind of attack that had worked at Zorkael II.

They were prepared to do the same at Zokra IV, but didn't really need to - only about a quarter of the remaining Raiders at the planet had the fuel to launch and try to fight.

They used their same procedures anyway, to minimize their own losses, but the fight was easier and over more quickly.

So when they got back to Cylon IV, they had hopes that its fighters too would be mostly out of fuel.

They were disappointed.

They were also disappointed in the results of the plagues. They had hoped to see some degradation in the Cylons' combat performance or numbers by now. But they apparently had plenty of resources to make up for any losses from the plagues.

So they had to do multiple rounds of raids, each time shooting 'box pattern' Planetary Pulsars, and having the 2088 destroyers, along with the other ship-mounted pulsars, pick off as many Raiders as they could, before Cylon IV was sufficiently weakened to attack.

By that time, Galactica had joined the fleet at Cylon IV, and participated in several of the raids.

Having 2 fast BattleStars to use, Cain worked far better than when he had only one. Many Raiders were separated, ambushed and wiped out by the 2 ships working together.

Though in the course of the attacks, the Cylons grew more and more wary, and found ways to reduce their losses until those losses were more or less balanced by new Raiders produced on the side of their planet that still had defenses. They also had an increasing amount of Raider production in new factories hidden underground.

But the Cylons were not the only ones producing more fighters.

Also rejoining the human fleet were the 2 Short Stack carriers which Cain had sent back to Gomoray to pick up the Vipers he'd had that planet's shipyard concentrating on building.

Each Short Stack normally carried 800 Raiders, but Vipers were only about a third as big as Raiders. So, with small modifications to accommodate the different shape of a Viper, each Short Stack could carry 2400 of them.

Alfred's ships had also been shuttling their Viper output to Gomoray for pickup there, to get as many as possible on hand for pickup by the Short Stacks.

Unfortunately, between Alfred's production and Gomoray's they had only been able to produce 4320 Vipers by the time the Short Stacks had to go back to the front, so the ships were not full.

Cain's 3 Base Stars had been getting vipers as well. During the raids, they had been getting a constant stream of new production brought up by freighters. Having not been refitted for Vipers yet, their practical limit was only twice their normal limit of Raiders. But they still had 600 Vipers each, for 1800 total.

Over half the Vipers were Recon Viper type 2b - the kind with a LandRam laser turret in place of a pilot, and with laser rifles fore and aft.

Cain had asked for those because they were so effective in dogfights - shooting in 3 directions at once could really clear out Cylons quickly, and it messed with the Cylons' normal tactics.

So, at the point where Cain judged the number of Raiders at Cylon IV to be as low as it would likely go before their increasing production started raising their totals again, he attacked.

Unlike the raids, there was little elegance and finesse to this attack.

Sometimes brute force is called for.

So while they still did all the usual tricks, to give them every advantage possible, the main thrust of the attack was fairly simple - the SiegeSpheres went straight in.

Almost 40,000 Raiders rose to meet them.

Both Antila and Tairac fired all their Planetary Pulsars in 'box pattern', destroying 630 Raiders while still in the planet's atmosphere, even though they were not flying close together. And as soon as they'd cleared the atmosphere, all 2088 destroyers fired their pulsars twice, taking down another 2881 Raiders. Pulsar fire from the Destroyer Escorts and SiegeSpheres took out another 79 Raiders.

Then the Raiders engaged the SiegeSpheres.

That stage of the fight was as simple as it was brutal - Raiders and SiegeSpheres simply slugged it out, while the rest of the human fleet briefly hung back.

Cylons tend to get focused on what they are doing, so once they'd engaged the SiegeSpheres, it was safe for the other human ships to move in. The fast ships - the 2 BattleStars, 12 Frigates, and Zorkaelian Battlecruiser all moved up to the fight, judging distances carefully so they'd just barely be in range of the outermost few Raiders at a time. These they concentrated on, quickly destroyed, then moved to engage more.

When the Raiders got annoyed enough to try to engage the BattleStars and other fast ships, those would 'flee'. With the Cylons now focused on them, they would lead the Raiders through a 'gauntlet', where the Destroyer Escorts or the slow Base Stars could fire at them from both sides, wiping them out in large numbers while remaining largely unmolested.

Raiders chasing fast ships also frequently got led past disguised mines, or were joined by human-owned remote-controlled Raiders, which appeared to be Cylons but would detonate at opportune times, trying to take out as many Raiders as possible with each detonation.

So the efforts of the fleet were steadily eroding the numbers of Raiders as they and the SiegeSpheres slugged it out.

Laser hits on the SiegeSpheres occurred continuously and in large numbers.

While the energy from each one was evenly distributed around the 2,576,629 cubic metrons of superconductor and only raised the total temperature by a trivial amount - .0034 degrees - they still added up.

The results of massed rail-gun fire added up too.

A hundred and ten Artillery Crawler mark 2 on each SiegeSphere, each with 12 rail-guns firing 3 dozen pellets per second, spat out, between them all, 95,040 pellets every second, each capable of killing a Raider. Most pellets missed, of course - the Raiders were good at dodging. But with so many pellets 'in the air' at once, there weren't many places to dodge to that didn't already contain a pellet. Even pellets that missed a specific target sometimes found another target.

The Raiders had to keep their distance or the cloud of pellets would take them out no matter how the Raiders dodged.

This prevented any Cylon remote-controlled Raiders from getting close enough to detonate on the SiegeSpheres.

The other Raiders fired at the SiegeSpheres from a distance.

It was a race to see which side could kill the other first.

The SiegeSpheres had each heated up over a hundred degrees by the time they killed their first 2000 Raiders.

Soon after that, the heat was enough to start boiling the water layer in Shell 1 of the spheres, to which lines of Superconductor had been run for this reason. Steam started venting out special nozzles which had been placed so as to cover the Sphere evenly.

Call it steam, or call it fog, either way it reduces the strength of lasers.

Between the reduced laser strength, and the heat spent to boil the water, the SiegeSpheres gained quite a bit of effective durability from using steam this way.

The SiegeSpheres had shot down another 3000 Raiders by the time the steam ran out and the hull temperature of the Spheres reached 200 degrees.

While the Raiders been focused on the Spheres, all the Vipers had been helping to the degree they could, swooping by and picking away at the clouds of Raiders, but not yet getting involved in a full dogfight, since the numbers disparity would have doomed them.

But now that the numbers of Raiders had fallen to just over 26,000, the 6584 Vipers they'd brought, minus a few already destroyed, fully engaged in dog-fighting.

The odds were almost 4 to 1 against them, but 3 to 1 odds against is no sweat for normal Vipers with good pilots.

And these vipers had extra help.

Mini-mines released by the Vipers took their toll on the Raiders, as did the rear-firing laser rifles.

And the Recon Vipers, with their turrets and great agility, took out far more than their share of Raiders.

Losses among the Vipers were high, and all the human ships took damage.

By the time the fight was won, the SiegeSpheres temperature was at 400 degrees - almost at their melting point, and they'd lost half of their Artillery Crawlers.

But the humans had won the fight.

As soon as the SiegeSpheres cooled down a bit, they joined the Recon Vipers type 2a, who'd reloaded their mines after the battle and were dive-bombing the anti-ship defenses remaining on the planet. The SiegeSpheres, as at the other planets, made short work of reducing the remaining defenses of all types.

Cylon IV was them bombarded mercilessly.

After an extended period of bombardment, when they were sure they'd hit everything worth hitting, they started over, as if they'd hit nothing yet, and hit it all again.

They they pounded on any suspected underground sites for good measure.

Then they landed a hundred thousand armed and angry Ootuul, to make sure all the Cylons were cleared out.

Just in case, they also sent in many more 'crop-dusting' runs to make sure the planet was covered in plagues that'd kill Cylons, but which had tested safe and harmless versus Ootuul and humans.

The fleet stayed ready to blast any threat until the all-clear came in.

The Cylons home planet had been destroyed, as had all their other major planets before.

Cain took his forces and hurried off to find if there were any remaining minor Cylon planets or outposts, and if so, defeat them too.

Adama took the Galactica to the original 12 Colonies, with the goal of reconquest.

He found that though the Cylons had had large garrisons there, they'd pulled most of their resources out over time, to reinforce their major worlds.

He had no trouble destroying their remaining bases and equipment.

The Cylons had left the buildings and infrastructure intact - as intact as it was after the initial bombardment anyway, which wasn't very intact. They'd left it alone and concentrated on hunting down humans, apparently with the intent of using the infrastructure themselves and making the 12 planets into Cylon worlds.

Each of the 12 Colonies had averaged just under 4 billion population before the Cylons attacked.

Since the Cylons had a lot of experience in wiping out whole populations, Adama had not expected to find any humans remaining on those worlds.

But it is remarkably hard to exterminate humans.

Some had hidden in inaccessible areas - swamps, thick forests, mountaintops, ravines and so on, and managed to hang on.

It had taken all their efforts to survive - to stay hidden and feed themselves. But they had survived - millions, all told.

The efforts to rescue them and rebuild the planets began immediately.

Any ship that could help hurried to do so.

Alfred's Liberty Ships, with their production capacity, were welcome in the rebuilding effort.

But the agricultural ships, park ships, and BattleSphere were far more welcome for their food production capacity. There were a lot of people to feed and their ability to feed themselves had been wrecked.

What was left of the fleet went its separate ways - each ship going back to the kinds of tasks it had had before joining the ragtag fleet. As much need as there had been for interplanetary shipping before, there was far more now. Rebuilding the 12 old Colonies and starting up the new ones required quite a bit of shipping.

The people of the fleet went their separate ways as well, looking to restart their old lives as best they could, either on old planets or new.

The Ootuul were allowed to keep whichever Cylon planets they wanted. Humans ended up colonizing the rest of the major Cylon worlds.

On Cylon IV they found the answer to the puzzle of why no Cylon maternity equipment had been found at other Cylon worlds.

How Cylons breed was apparently a close-kept Cylon secret - they, like some kinds of wasps, laid eggs in live herbivores. The eggs grew and hatched inside the hosts and then ate their way out, killing the hosts.

These herbivores, and the plants they ate, were both extremely picky about the environment they lived in, and no efforts to transport either to another planet had ever worked.

So Cylons bred only on Cylon IV. They shipped their people to other planets from there.

Upon learning this, the humans made an effort to change the climate of Cylon IV.

Just as they had at Tairac, they emplaced big mirrors orbiting the sun to direct much more of it's energy at Cylon IV and heat it up.

And their ships redirected hundreds of comets at the planet - the biggest comets they could, though each was still so small that they would entirely melt and boil off as they passed through the planet's atmosphere.

That was ok - melting the ice did not make the molecules disappear somehow. So billions of tons of water was added to the planet.

So the planet, which had been cool and dry, got warmer and wetter.

They did as much of that as they thought necessary, then did as much again, just to be sure.

Nobody wanted a resurgence of the Cylons.

Though just bombarding them would probably have been enough - Cylons were only born with 1 brain. They had to have advanced technology to do their brain transplants and get the 2 and 3-brain varieties.

So, having bombarded to the point where any remaining Cylons probably had no advanced hospital sites left, probably limited them to only one brain. And with only one brain, they were mere drones with no initiative or free will. That was probably not a threat.

But, after what they had been through, nobody was comfortable with 'probably', so they worked to make sure.

After the rebuilding had progressed sufficiently Adama - in command of the whole fleet and still on Galactica - joined Cain in the efforts to make sure there were no Cylon outposts or minor worlds anywhere. While they were at it, they also policed human space, prevented the piracy that some minor races had sometimes engaged in, and so on.

Alfred found a nice world and, with many of 'his people', colonized it.

He was setting up an enormous factory and looking forward to building things for the rest of his life, when Floyd and Sally - with Mister Fluffy-Cuddles wrapped around her as usual - came in and announced:

"Congratulations on your election, Governor!"

"What?", he stammered, "I didn't run for Governor. Part time Council work is as much as I want to spare away from building things. More than I want to spare, really."

"Well, Governor," Floyd grinned, "Enough people put you down as a write-in candidate that you won. We couldn't think of anybody we'd rather lead us."

Alfred frowned. "I don't want to be Governor. You can't make me .. I'm ineligible by the new rules, since I've most recently been working in an idea field - politics - while on the Council."

He looked triumphant for a moment, until Sally said:

"We checked that, but since you've actually been spending far more time building things than working on the Council, you still count as a recent builder and are therefore eligible. And we Can make you - the new law voted in by referendum at the same time saw to that. So there!" She playfully stuck out her tongue.

Alfred sighed in defeat, then, like so many times before, he got down to work.

-the end-


	28. Chapter 28

Apollo sat in stunned silence.

Boxey had just beaten him in a dogfight.

Sure, it was just a video game, played on their game units, and despite all its efforts at realism, it wasn't prefect, but still...

It was embarrassing, even if it was just a one-time fluke.

Boxey was still just a little kid.

He'd occasionally been beating his mother Serena, especially since she got pregnant, stopped flying, and had gone back to the profession she loved - newscasting and making documentaries. But she was not very experienced as a pilot, while Apollo was, if not the best fighter pilot there was, at least in contention for that title.

It made Apollo feel, at once, both very proud, and like he was getting old.

Maybe it was time to think about settling down on a nice planet. He and Serena had both come close to dying a number of times during the Cylon War.

With that war over, their survival chances had skyrocketed, but flying missions was also a lot more boring.

Maybe he'd look into a nice instructor slot at the new Academy. He figured he could get Starbuck to join him there just by sugesting it. The Academy had an "opposing force" team that flew mock dogfights against trainees which should be a lot more fun than flying one uneventful mission after another...


End file.
